The TOI correspondent from Washington: In what was widely seen as part trolling and part wishful fantasy, MAGA supremo Donald Trump on Friday declared himself in a social media post to be the “greatest” president in US history, ahead of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and others (who in his view were merely great).The bizarre and provocative post, viewed by some of his own supporters as excessively narcissistic, came hours after Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America” amid an increasingly testy relationship with Canada. In another post, Trump listed five presidents, including himself, Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Reagan, as the ones who built America. The five who broke it? Buchanan, Wilson, Carter, Obama, and Biden — all Democrats.Even MAGA principals are starting to wince at the 80-year old President’s increasingly surreal social media posts. Critics – some of whom believe his unvetted aide Natalie Harp is responsible for the torrent of rubbish – are wondering meanwhile if he can, or should, last out his term, often invoking the 25th amendment that allows replacing an incapacitated president.Several commentators called his post “delusional” and “pathetic” and attention-seeking, pointing out that in reality a poll of historians and scholars ranked Trump dead last and the worse president in history. “Usually you allow other people to say how great you are. But as soon as you start saying, I’m the greatest, that usually means that you suck,” one political analyst sneered on a tv show.Earlier, Trump turned one of North America’s Great Lakes into the latest casualty of his increasingly aggressive war against nouns. Following up his earlier transformation of the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, he changed Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America, a makeover that delighted his MAGA flock that embraces such frivolities as “trolling” and “owning the libs.” He also offered a tantalizing clue to what could be next: the Atlantic and/or Pacific oceans (stand-by Indian Ocean).Trump’s fascination with renaming things is part of a larger obsession with names and ratings, brands and branding. To the real-estate developer turned president, apparently nothing is quite complete until it has his or his chosen nameplate on it. Buildings need his name, as do golf courses, universities, airports, steaks, and wines.The Kennedy Center has provided the most engaging example of this branding impulse, with Trump-aligned trustees repeatedly seeking to put his name on the Washington performing-arts institution despite a federal judge ruling that the board overstepped its authority. Trump loyalists say the Center risks being demolished if his name is not attached to the refurbished building.The nomenclatural scrap over Lake Ontario though provides a delicious historical irony: the name predates both the United States and Canada, deriving, according to Canadian PM Mark Carney, from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.”Which essentially leaves the descendants of European colonizers and conquerors – the British, French and assorted later immigrants who eventually created the U.S and Canada – engaged in a spirited argument over what to call a lake whose original name came from people who were here before any of them. Rather like two tenants fighting over the correct name for a house while the original owner is sidelined.Indeed, America is littered with Indigenous names. Mississippi comes from an indigenous word associated with the great river. Across the US, states including Michigan, Minnesota, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Wyoming, Ohio, Massachusetts and Connecticut bear names rooted in the languages of Native Americans (who were themselves misidentified as “Indians.”). So do names such as Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec in Canada, not to mention dozens of towns and rivers and settlements across the continent. And Trump, apparently, wants to solve this historical complexity with a Sharpie – while blowing his own Trumpet.
