Vermont’s GOP governor: Trump’s Lake Ontario order ‘petty and disappointing’

Vermont’s Republican Governor Calls Trump’s Lake Ontario Renaming “Petty” as Trade Clash With Canada Escalates

Provpnadvice.com – The simmering trade confrontation between Washington and Ottawa took a sharp turn on Thursday when Vermont Governor Phil Scott (R) publicly dismissed President Trump’s executive order rebranding Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” Scott’s rebuke landed amid a rapidly intensifying tariff standoff that has drawn sharp reactions from politicians on both sides of the border and within both major parties.

A Republican Governor Breaks Ranks

Scott, who is currently campaigning for a second term in the Vermont governor’s mansion, used a social media post to voice what he framed as a practical objection to the symbolic gesture. His remarks were notable not merely for their content but for their provenance: Scott has already clashed with the president over National Guard deployment decisions and proposed restrictions on mail-in voting, making his latest critique another data point in a growing pattern of intra-party friction.

“This is petty and disappointing. We should be at the negotiating table, finding a path forward that strengthens both the U.S. and Canadian economies.”

He followed that with a broader economic warning aimed at both American and Canadian households:

“Further escalating tensions does nothing to help American or Canadian families and businesses.”

Those sentiments, while framed in Scott’s own voice, closely track the position already articulated by other Republican senators. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, for instance, has publicly urged the president to walk back the latest round of tariff increases on Canadian imports, signaling that the administration’s hardline posture is not uniformly embraced within its own party.

The Tariff Trigger

The renaming order did not arrive in a vacuum. On Sunday, the Trump administration activated a 50 percent tariff on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods, a move that Ottawa has pledged to answer with dollar-for-dollar retaliatory duties under new trade rates scheduled to take effect on September 8. The tit-for-tat dynamic has pushed both governments into a cycle of escalation that economists warn could ripple through supply chains in the automotive, energy, and agricultural sectors that depend heavily on cross-border flows.

For Vermont specifically, the stakes are tangible. The state’s dairy industry, timber exports, and small manufacturing base all rely on stable access to the Canadian market. A prolonged tariff war threatens not only export revenues but also the cost inputs that Vermont producers import from the north, squeezing margins from both ends.

From Electricity Threats to Water Names

The personal animosity between the two leaders has become almost as visible as the policy dispute. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, responding to what he characterized as American economic coercion, threatened to restrict electricity exports to U.S. states that draw power from the province’s grid. That remark reportedly prompted Trump to first float the idea of renaming the Great Lake that borders New York State — a body of water spanning roughly 7,340 square miles and shared by four U.S. states and one Canadian province.

The executive order formalizing the name change to “Lake America” was then issued, converting a passing quip into binding federal nomenclature and igniting a fresh round of political theater.

New York and Other Voices Push Back

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) moved quickly to signal that her state would not adopt the new designation in official communications. She stated that the state “won’t be calling” the waterway by its renamed title, a position that underscores the practical and legal complications of unilaterally altering the name of an international water body governed by bilateral treaties dating back to the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton weighed in on the social platform X, reinforcing the point with a terse declaration:

“It’s Lake Ontario.”

The reaction from Clinton, a figure who has spent decades in foreign-policy circles, carried particular weight given that the lake’s governance involves treaty obligations, shared environmental stewardship, and decades of joint scientific monitoring. Renaming the feature in a domestic executive order does not alter those international legal frameworks, but it does inject a layer of diplomatic friction into an already strained relationship.

A Pattern of Renaming

The Lake Ontario order is not an isolated impulse. Since returning to the White House for a second term, Trump has pursued a broader campaign of geographic rebranding. Most prominently, he attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” a move that drew immediate pushback from Mexico and from domestic cartographic and scientific communities that rely on established nomenclature for navigation, research, and commerce.

The administration’s insistence on the Gulf of America label also produced a concrete institutional consequence: last year, The Associated Press was barred from certain White House press pool engagements for several weeks after continuing to use the traditional name in its copy. The wire service ultimately returned to the pool in April 2025 after prevailing in a federal lawsuit that characterized the ban as First Amendment retaliation against a news organization for its editorial choices.

What Comes Next

With retaliatory tariffs set to activate on September 8 and both governments signaling that further escalation is possible, the coming weeks will test whether the trade dispute can be channeled back into structured negotiations. Scott’s call to return to the “negotiating table” captures a sentiment shared by business groups, agricultural associations, and state-level officials on both sides of the border who view the current trajectory as economically self-defeating. Whether the administration will accept that framing, or continue to treat symbolic gestures as leverage in a broader bargaining strategy, remains the central open question as autumn approaches.