By Louise Mathews
One of my Facebook buddies, who also goes back to the 4th Grade with me, posted a map of western New York State with the name “Lake 25th Amendment” pasted where “Lake Ontario” should be. She and I have sometimes sparred online over politics, but on this one, I could see her point.
To me, President Trump’s renaming the lake of my childhood smacks of poor judgment to say the least and insanity at the most. I take this executive order personally because I grew up one mile from Ontario’s shores.
“Ontario” derives from Wyandot, or Huron, words for “great lake” and “beautiful lake,” which it is in all seasons. It’s “slick ca’m” flat on still spring days, roiled with thunderheads like great ships sailing too far out for sound to carry in summer, jaunty with pert whitecaps on a breezy autumn afternoon, and lined with ice sculptures thrown up by frozen waves in the winter.
Like the ocean, Lake Ontario always reminds me of the brevity of life while hinting at eternity. The year my mother was dying from terminal cancer, I visited every three weeks or so, and I would always drive along the lake on my way back to her house from the care facility where she resided in her last months. That was the longer way home, but I needed to see the lake with its variety of blues, greens and even mauve. Lake Shore Drive brought me peace.
President Trump can sign all the executive orders he wants, but in my NIMBY mind, and I think in the minds of western Empire State residents, he cannot change Lake Ontario, or Ontario County, or Ontario Beach, or the Lake Ontario Parkway or any other Ontario along the southside of the lake.
I have been scratching my head wondering whether the President’s ego, narcissism, or lesions in his hippocampus have sidetracked the reasoning ability he once had. Perhaps his reliance on Diet Coke has finally eroded his frontal lobe and decision-making capacity.
This silliness about the name of a Great Lake is wasting what precious political capital the President has. He might think the 2024 election gave him a mandate, but I suspect many of the people who voted for him were like me, voting against the other side. His polling numbers tell us he has lost much of the support he once had. Faced with the fact that the middle- and lower-income people are hurting in the Trump economy that has not brought prices down, and an unpopular war that he does not seem to be capable of ending, Mr. Trump does not need to be doing stupid stuff like renaming Lake Ontario, or fighting with a two-century old ally for that matter.
So, when I saw Mr. Trump had decided that Lake Ontario would henceforth be known as “Lake America” – at least to all federal departments and agencies – I had to ask, “Is the man all there?” Are his 2026 mistakes indications that his mental acuity is diminished? How crazy does he have to become before the members of his Cabinet, most of whom are quite sane, capable people, decide that they need to invoke the 25th Amendment?
Two days later, Mr. Trump announced, with suitable gravitas, that he has made a deal with Venezuela to obtain vast quantities of oil that should bring the price of gas down for the American consumer sometime in our lifetimes. I scratched my head again, because this is what Presidents are supposed to do, and this action is certainly within the realm of good sense. The snippets of his Aug. 30 interview with Trey Gowdy that I have viewed show a lucid, measured, rational man.
My husband says the President is just trolling the Left and the Canadians, which may be the same thing. Once upon a time, I might have laughed with him, even though I disagreed with plastering Trump on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts or deciding the Gulf needed a new name. I agree with most of the President’s agenda, and when he speaks as a civil person, I can even admire him.
But the rapidity with which Mr. Trump can move from reasonable leader to ranting autocrat gives me whiplash.
I am looking forward to a time when he can be found only on a golf course, and the rest of the world can catch its breath.
Louise Mathews retired from a career in community colleges and before that, theater. A 13-year come-here in Beaufort, she has been a dingbatter in North Carolina and an upstater from New York.