Trump threatens to rename Lake Ontario 'Lake America' amid Canada trade tensions

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that he was considering changing the name of Lake Ontario to "Lake America" as a trade war between the United States and Canada escalates.

"The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

One of the five Great Lakes of North America, Lake Ontario borders both the Canadian province of Ontario and the U.S. state of New York.

Asked about Trump's comment, Canada's minister responsible for U.S. trade, Dominic LeBlanc, said that Canada would not respond to social media posts by the U.S. administration.

“We've decided as a federal government months ago not to respond to sort of the daily social media posts of either the president or his cabinet secretaries," LeBlanc said in an interview on CNBC.

Trump's threat to rename Lake Ontario comes after he changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America last year.

-Reporting by Bhargav Acharya and Katharine Jackson; editing by Michelle Nichols/Reuters