The Associated Press said Wednesday it will keep calling Lake Ontario by its name, despite Trump's order renaming it. He signed the executive order renaming it Lake America on 27 August. Narativ reported on 31 August what he is actually after: the drinking water, the water that runs the power plants on its shore, and the shipping. He has since threatened to change New Mexico's name too.
Trump has run out of tariffs that work, so he has moved on to names and shelves. He signed five Canada proclamations on Tuesday evening, and three of them ban goods Americans can pick up off a shelf. Whisky. Beer. Motorcycles with big engines. The White House posted the documents at 18:50 ET. The bans take effect at 12:01 a.m. on 29 September.
He reached for a 1930 law to do it. Section 338 of the Tariff Act lets a president shut a country's goods out entirely instead of taxing them, and Trump cited it in all three orders. A tariff makes you pay more. A ban means you cannot buy it.
Carney moved first, and moved in kind. He put C$27.6 billion of counter-tariffs into force Tuesday morning, hours before Trump signed anything.
Read the annexes and the bans get narrower — and stranger — than they sound: a quarter of one percent of what Canada sells America, and a prime minister with his next flight already booked.
