Comedian Bill Maher took a swipe at liberals upset over President Donald Trump’s move to rename Lake Ontario, joking that the left is hardly unfamiliar with changing names to suit a political message.
During Friday’s opening monologue on HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher riffed on Trump’s decision to rebrand one of the Great Lakes as “Lake America” amid a continuing trade dispute with Canada.
“Trump is so mad at Canada he renamed Lake Ontario Lake America,” Maher quipped. “Now I gotta buy a new globe again.”
“It’s like the fifth time it’s happened,” he continued, alluding to Trump’s earlier renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
The joke came as trade negotiations between the U.S. and Canada collapsed late Friday, with Washington pressing ahead with 50% tariffs on Canadian goods.
Maher then took aim at liberal outrage over the president’s decision, suggesting critics of Trump’s move had embraced politically driven changes in terminology themselves.
“The liberals are very pissed at this,” Maher quipped. “They say you can’t just go around changing things to fit your political agenda. Just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
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Trump signed the executive order renaming the lake from the Oval Office on Thursday, telling reporters, “This is official, effective immediately.”
Maher’s criticism was echoed by NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck, who told Fox News Digital that liberals’ willingness to embrace new terminology undermines their criticism of Trump’s latest decision.
“The fact that ‘Latinx’ and ‘birthing person’ are increasingly accepted as a punchline rather than a serious demographic statement should give all of us hope that ‘Woke 1’ is dead, and we’re never going back to that farcical time,” Houck told Fox News Digital.
“If only the liberal, elitist media could more consistently get the picture,” he continued. “The left needs to take a seat before they can say anything about anything being renamed.”
The sentiment was echoed by NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham.
“Liberals want to rename all kinds of things to satisfy their urge for wokeness,” Graham told Fox News Digital. “Just in this decade, they’ve pulled down all kinds of statues and renamed scads of military bases. What they hate is anything Trump does to add a patriotic pro-America tinge to something which they associate more with his ego than with patriotism. They see red — as in a red MAGA cap.
“The media routinely genuflect ethnic and LGBTQ pressure groups and their demands to remake the language we’re all supposed to use,” he continued. “So, they can’t seriously object to renaming things. They just want to be the only people who get to rename things.”