‘It’s SHAME’: Spike rearranges Great Lakes acronym to sum up Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” the latest escalation in a spiraling trade war with Canada. KIRO host Spike O’Neill had a one-word response to the move.

“It’s SHAME,” Spike said on “The Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio.

He was rearranging the classic HOMES acronym that students use to remember the five Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). With Ontario swapped for America, KIRO host Jake Skorheim noted the new acronym becomes HAMES. Spike had a better idea: rearrange the letters to spell SHAME.

“I think it really speaks to the whole movement of renaming Lake Ontario,” Spike said.

Spike says this is media manipulation at its finest

Spike said the renaming has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with controlling the news cycle while bigger stories play out in the background.

“This is the distracticons at full force,” Spike said. “There’s only so much bandwidth we can dedicate to what we give our attention to, and our president is so good at this. He’s so good at controlling a narrative, controlling a media story. It’s maybe his greatest … I mean, he’s a genius at media manipulation.”

Spike pointed to what he sees as the real story: $20 billion in new U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods and $20 billion in matching retaliatory tariffs from Canada, plus the impact those will have on American consumers and businesses.

“While we talk about $20 billion worth of US tariffs, a matching $20 billion in reciprocal tariffs from Canada, and the cost those will have to American consumers, the impact it will have on American businesses,” Spike said. “That’s a smaller story than Lake America.”

Jake shares Lake Ontario facts before the name disappears

Before the debate, Jake rattled off a series of facts about the lake formerly known as Ontario.

Lake Ontario is 193 miles long, 53 miles wide, and has 712 miles of shoreline. It sits at just 283 feet deep, making it relatively shallow by Great Lakes standards, and it is the lake where all other Great Lakes drain into through the Niagara River, connecting Lake Superior, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, and Lake Erie before reaching Ontario.

Jake noted that the lake’s name has roots in the French fur trappers who were instrumental in the region.

The executive order directs Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to update all federal references to reflect the new name, according to The Associated Press. Trump cannot force Canada to adopt the name change, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has already said his country will keep calling it Lake Ontario.

The move follows Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” at the start of his second term.

“As you know, we took something called the Gulf of Mexico. We changed it, and now it’s very routinely the Gulf of America,” Trump said during the signing. “So if you think about it, we have a gulf, and we have a lake. Now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3