A GOP state lawmaker in Pennsylvania is preparing a resolution asking President Trump to rename Lake Erie to "Lake Pennsylvania", joining a growing wave of geographic rebranding efforts that have already drawn pushback from Canada and Democrats alike.
State Rep. David Maloney, a Republican, wants Trump, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, and congressional lawmakers to take formal steps to rebrand the Great Lake. Maloney's argument is straightforward: Pennsylvania touches only one of the five Great Lakes, and the state's economy along that shoreline depends on fishing, boating, and tourism. He thinks the name should reflect that connection.
Fox News reported that Maloney is still preparing the resolution, meaning it has not yet been formally filed in Harrisburg. No co-sponsors have been announced, and the resolution's precise language has not been released.
Maloney framed his case around geography and fairness. In a statement, he pointed out that neighboring states already have plenty of Great Lakes frontage:
"Ohio has plenty of shoreline. New York already has two Great Lakes. Canada has four others."
His conclusion was blunt:
"Pennsylvania has one. Let's call it Lake Pennsylvania!"
Maloney also tied the proposal to the lake's economic role. He said renaming it would "reflect the lake's modern identity," arguing that Pennsylvania's stretch of Erie shoreline draws boaters, anglers, families, and tourists who fuel the local economy.
By the numbers, Lake Erie is the smallest of the Great Lakes by volume and the shallowest, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly 12 million people live in its watershed, about 10.5 million on the U.S. side and 1.9 million in Canada.
Of course, those 12 million people are spread across four U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario. Ohio, New York, and Michigan all share the shoreline. Whether lawmakers in those states would welcome Pennsylvania claiming naming rights over a body of water they also border is an open question the resolution does not address.
Maloney's pitch rides a wave that started on Trump's first day back in office in January 2025, when the president signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America." That order applies only to the U.S. federal government, Mexico, international bodies, and private entities are not bound by it.
Last month, Trump signed a second executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America," a move tied to the ongoing trade dispute with Canada. Apple Maps and Google Maps both updated their platforms for U.S. users, displaying the new names through a region-based approach tailored to device location. Canadian users still see "Lake Ontario."
The Lake Ontario renaming drew objections from Democrats and from Ottawa. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the change outright:
"We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms. Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario, then, now and always."
Carney's statement underscores the practical limit of executive rebranding: the U.S. government can change what it calls a lake on federal maps and documents, but it cannot force a sovereign neighbor to follow suit. The same constraint would apply to any Lake Erie renaming. Canada shares that shoreline, and Ottawa has shown no appetite for American-led name changes.
The president has not stopped at lakes and gulfs. Trump suggested renaming New Mexico to "New America," a proposal that prompted Democratic state lawmakers there to call on Apple and Google to publicly commit to keeping the state's current name on their mapping platforms. No executive order or formal action has followed on New Mexico.
Trump has also floated the idea of renaming the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, though again without any formal executive action. And the administration's push to rename Penn Station in New York added another front to the broader pattern.
On Capitol Hill, Rep. Jimmy Patronis, a Florida Republican, is pushing legislation to make the "Lake America" label permanent, enshrining it in statute rather than leaving it dependent on an executive order that a future president could reverse. Details of that bill have not been made public.
Several practical hurdles stand between Maloney's idea and any actual name change. The resolution itself has not been filed. It is unclear what formal federal process would be required to rename a Great Lake, whether an executive order alone would suffice, or whether Congress would need to act. The fact that Lake Erie borders four states and a foreign country complicates any unilateral claim.
Even the Nashville airport renaming effort, which involved a single facility in a single city, required a formal board vote and a defined process. Renaming a shared international waterway would be orders of magnitude more complex.
Maloney's resolution is also, at this stage, purely symbolic. A Pennsylvania state resolution does not carry the force of federal law. It would amount to a formal request, a polite ask directed at the White House, the Interior Department, and Congress. Whether anyone in Washington picks it up remains to be seen.
Still, the proposal fits a pattern that has become unmistakable under this administration. Geographic renaming has gone from a one-off executive flourish to a recurring theme, part branding exercise, part diplomatic signal, part cultural statement. Democrats have objected at every turn. Canada has dug in. And now a Pennsylvania Republican wants his state's name on the map in a bigger way.
If nothing else, Maloney's pitch makes a fair point: Pennsylvania does have only one Great Lake. Whether that earns it naming rights is another matter, but in an era when the Gulf of Mexico became the Gulf of America with a stroke of a pen, stranger things have happened.
