The $18 billion settlement between Meta and 48 U.S. states may finally force Facebook and Instagram to confront one of their most obvious problems: children spending too much time on them. A two-hour daily limit, an overnight shutdown, stronger age verification and other protections are hardly trivial. They may even give parents something they have been requesting for years: a technological equivalent of saying, “Enough. Go to bed.”
But there is an uncomfortable question hiding underneath all those restrictions: What exactly are young people being protected from? Apparently, two hours of Instagram is dangerous, but two hours of Instagram filled with lies, manipulated videos, conspiracy theories and digital hatred is somehow merely a content-moderation problem.
That distinction is absurd. The greatest danger of social media is not simply that teenagers scroll too much. It is that while they scroll, someone is constantly trying to capture their attention with whatever is most provocative, outrageous, frightening or emotionally intoxicating. A teenager can spend twenty minutes looking at harmless photographs and then encounter a fake video portraying an event that never happened, a conspiracy theory presented as fact, or a vicious post designed to turn one group against another.
The algorithm does not care whether something is true. It cares whether people stop scrolling. That is the problem. A fabricated video can travel faster than a correction. A lie can acquire millions of views before anyone has checked it. A hateful post can generate thousands of angry replies while a sober explanation receives approximately the attention of a forgotten library notice.
And artificial intelligence is making the problem considerably worse. Fake photographs and synthetic videos are becoming increasingly convincing. Soon, “I saw it on Facebook” may be about as meaningful as saying, “A man in a pub told me.”
Yet regulators remain strangely fascinated by the stopwatch. Of course excessive screen time matters. Children need sleep, exercise, school, friends and the occasional miraculous experience of looking out of a window. But reducing the quantity of misinformation does not solve the quality of misinformation.
Indeed, a teenager could now spend exactly two permitted hours consuming a concentrated diet of political lies, racist fantasies, misogynistic abuse, conspiracy theories and fabricated videos. Congratulations: the child has complied with the settlement while the internet has still managed to poison the information environment.
Meta's settlement does include additional safeguards, and critics have argued that more attention must be paid to recommendation systems and harmful content. But the deeper problem remains remarkably simple. Social-media companies have built enormously sophisticated machines for predicting what will keep human beings engaged, yet society still struggles to demand equally sophisticated systems for determining what deserves to be believed.
That imbalance should embarrass us. A healthy digital environment cannot merely ask, “How long were you online?” It must also ask, “What did you encounter while you were there?”
If regulators are serious about protecting young people, they should stop treating social-media addiction as principally a matter of minutes and start treating the information ecosystem itself as a public concern. Two hours of truth is not necessarily harmful. Two hours of lies can be.
Richard Stanford’s “Peter Madden and Theatre of Prison” – book review
There are books about prison, and then there are books that seem to carry the atmosphere of prison between their pages; the claustrophobia, violence, despair, boredom and occasionally the extraordinary flashes of humanity that survive behind bars. Richard Stanford’s Peter Madden and Theatre of Prison belongs firmly to the latter category. It is not simply a biography of a prisoner who became a writer. It is a remarkable study of how creativity can emerge from confinement and how, for one man, writing became another form of escape.
I have the particular pleasure of reviewing this book not only as a reader but as someone who s honoured to often communicate with Richard Stanford personally and in many levels. That makes the experience more personal, but it also makes me appreciate the seriousness of what he has undertaken. Stanford has not produced a conventional prison memoir or another familiar tale of redemption. Instead, he has constructed an unusual hybrid of biography, memoir, interviews and screenplay, allowing Peter Madden’s own voice and imagination to remain at the centre of the story.
Madden’s journey is extraordinary. A long-term prisoner, he found himself confronted with the monotonous treadmill of incarceration and the psychological pressures that accompany years behind bars. Yet instead of allowing prison to define the limits of his existence, he began teaching himself to write. The act was both practical and symbolic: if the prison controlled his physical movements, perhaps words could provide the freedom his body could not.
This is where Stanford’s book becomes especially compelling. Madden did not escape prison by pretending it did not exist. He escaped, intellectually and creatively, by confronting it. His writing turned the prison environment, its inhabitants and its demons into material for theatre. The men around him became characters; their conflicts became dramatic narratives; their fears, obsessions and contradictions became something that could be examined rather than merely endured.
The result was a body of work that occupies a distinctive place in prison literature. Madden’s stage plays are not romanticised portraits of incarcerated men. They are darker, stranger and more revealing. He looks directly at the psychology of prisoners and the forces that shape behaviour inside an institution designed primarily to control rather than rehabilitate.
Stanford wisely allows these portraits to speak for themselves. His use of screenplay conventions gives the book an almost cinematic quality, while the interviews provide an immediacy that a conventional biography might lack. We hear Madden reflecting on his past, his motivations and the circumstances that transformed him into a writer. The effect is intimate without becoming sentimental.
Perhaps the most fascinating theme is the paradox at the heart of Madden’s story: prison becomes both the worst and, in an unexpected sense, the best possible environment for the creation of a writer. It is obviously a “living hell”, as the book describes it, but hell provides an extraordinary abundance of human drama. Fear, anger, loyalty, betrayal, loneliness, violence and friendship exist in concentrated form. Madden learned to observe these things and, more importantly, to transform observation into art.
That transformation is the book’s real achievement.
Peter Madden and Theatre of Prison also raises larger questions about what society means by rehabilitation. We often speak about prisoners in statistical or institutional language: sentences, offences, recidivism, release dates. Stanford’s book asks us to look instead at the individual imagination. What happens when somebody whom society has effectively written off discovers that he can create, communicate and make strangers listen?
The answer is surprisingly powerful. This is not an easy book, nor should it be. It deals with darkness without decorating it. Yet there is ultimately something deeply hopeful about Madden’s story. His greatest act of defiance was not escaping physically from prison but discovering that his imagination could not be imprisoned.
Richard Stanford has captured that journey with intelligence, sympathy and a strong sense of drama. His friendship with Madden’s story is never allowed to overwhelm the subject; instead, it seems to have given him the patience to listen closely and the determination to preserve the voice of a man whose experiences might otherwise have remained unheard.
Peter Madden and Theatre of Prison is therefore more than a book about one prisoner becoming a writer. It is a book about the stubborn survival of imagination under circumstances designed to extinguish it.
Madden discovered that prison could take away years, freedom and opportunities but it could not necessarily take away the ability to tell a story. And sometimes, a story is the first door through which freedom begins.
Six months into the war with Iran, Donald Trump has arrived at the most awkward destination in American foreign policy, the exit ramp. There is only one problem. He cannot admit that he needs one.
The war that was supposed to demonstrate overwhelming American power has instead become a test of political endurance. The administration's objectives have shifted, military pressure has failed to produce the clean strategic outcome promised at the beginning, the Strait of Hormuz remains a central problem, and Washington has increasingly turned from bombs to economic pressure and negotiations.
This is not how Trump imagined victory. Trump's preferred political universe has always been one in which every retreat can be renamed a triumph. A compromise becomes a historic deal. A concession becomes brilliant leverage. A pause becomes overwhelming strength. A problem created by yesterday's decision becomes proof of today's genius.
But Iran is refusing to cooperate with the script. That is the great irony of this war. Trump entered it promising that American power would settle the matter quickly. Six months later, Washington is looking for diplomatic doors that it once seemed determined to kick off their hinges. Recent efforts have included indirect negotiations and attempts to find a formula for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, while the administration has increasingly emphasized sanctions and economic pressure.
The transformation is politically revealing. A president who once treated negotiation as something reserved for winners now needs negotiation precisely because the military solution has become insufficient. Iran has been badly damaged, but damage is not the same thing as surrender. The Iranian government remains capable of causing disruption, retaining leverage in the Gulf and making America's continued involvement costly.
This is where the rhetoric collides with reality. Trump can declare victory whenever he wishes. The presidency comes with a remarkably powerful microphone. But declarations do not reopen strategic waterways, replenish depleted weapons stockpiles, erase casualties or manufacture an acceptable political settlement.
And Americans are beginning to notice the difference. The war's domestic political cost is becoming harder to disguise. Support for military action has fallen, while rising energy costs and broader economic uncertainty have created precisely the kind of political environment in which a foreign-policy adventure becomes a domestic liability. Reuters reported this week that only 31 percent of Americans in a Reuters/Ipsos poll supported U.S. military action against Iran.
For Trump, the timing could hardly be worse. The midterms are approaching. Republicans do not need another foreign-policy monument to presidential improvisation hanging around their necks. Voters may tolerate a spectacular military operation. They are considerably less enthusiastic about paying for a prolonged geopolitical experiment every time they fill their cars or buy groceries.
So Trump needs an exit. What he does not want is an exit that looks like one. That distinction may ultimately determine how this war ends. The sensible solution would be diplomacy: a negotiated arrangement that protects American interests, addresses the nuclear question, establishes mechanisms for de-escalation and gives both sides enough political cover to claim something resembling success.
That is precisely what makes it so difficult for Trump. Diplomacy requires accepting that the other side exists, has interests and cannot simply be ordered to disappear.
The mature president would explain that ending a war responsibly is itself a form of strength. The political showman fears that voters will see responsibility as retreat.
But there is nothing dignified about remaining in a war merely to avoid admitting that leaving is necessary.
The real humiliation would not be negotiating an exit. It would be sacrificing more lives, money and credibility because the president is too proud to call an exit what it is: the beginning of wisdom.
Trump created the problem. Now he needs to discover whether he is capable of solving it without creating an even larger one. History is rarely kind to leaders who confuse victory speeches with victories. And Iran has given Donald Trump the one thing his political career has consistently avoided, a problem that cannot be solved by simply declaring himself the winner.
In the bustling undergrowth of Picante Hill, Anton the culinary ant dons his oversized toque and delivers deliciously chaotic cooking wisdom, one tiny misadventure at a time.
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There must be moments, late at night, when some of the Conservative politicians who have marched through Nigel Farage’s revolving door quietly wonder whether they have made a terrible mistake. Perhaps they lie awake remembering the old Tory party, the one with its rituals, its grand old men, its conference rows, its Cabinet committees and, above all, the comforting certainty that everyone knew who was supposed to be in charge.
Instead, they joined Reform UK. And now they have Nigel Farage. This is not necessarily a criticism of Reform’s policies. One can agree with its arguments on immigration, taxation or the failures of Westminster without necessarily signing up for the increasingly personalised politics surrounding its leader. The curious thing about some of the Tory defectors is that they appear to have escaped one political personality cult only to discover another waiting at the railway station.
The Conservative Party they abandoned was indeed exhausted. It had spent years eating itself, changing prime ministers, fighting internal wars and treating political survival as a substitute for political purpose. The 2024 election was not merely a defeat but an exorcism. Reform offered an obvious escape hatch: sharper language, fewer inhibitions and the intoxicating promise that politics could once again be about enemies rather than committees.
For politicians such as Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Danny Kruger and others, joining Farage could therefore look less like betrayal than migration to the future. Reform seemed energetic while the Conservatives seemed embalmed.
But political movements have an awkward habit of revealing themselves once the honeymoon ends. Farage's political gift is enormous. He understands grievance, television, timing and the emotional vocabulary of people who believe that polite politics has failed them. But charisma has a darker twin: narcissism. A party built around one man inevitably risks becoming an audience for that man's performance.
And there are already signs that Reform is discovering the difference between a movement and a personality cult. Internal criticism of Farage has produced uncomfortable consequences, while quarrels involving senior figures have exposed tensions between the party's populist theatre and the rather more complicated business of building a functioning political organisation.
This should make former Conservatives nostalgic. Not necessarily for Boris Johnson. Certainly not for Liz Truss. And probably not for the endless parliamentary soap opera that preceded the Conservative collapse. But they may discover that boring politics has virtues.
A party with competing factions can be irritating. A party with no competing factions can be frightening. A Cabinet full of people arguing can look dysfunctional; a movement in which everyone eventually learns to applaud the leader can look efficient right up until it becomes dangerous.
The defectors may have believed they were joining the Conservative Party without the Conservative Party's baggage. They may instead have joined something more volatile: a political vehicle whose greatest strength and greatest weakness is the same man.
That is the irony. The old Tories were painfully dull, occasionally ridiculous and spectacularly capable of self-sabotage. Reform is exciting, angry and apparently convinced that history has finally arrived at its front door.
But perhaps, after watching Farage perform his Trumpian politics of grievance and personal dominance, some of the defectors are beginning to miss the old blue benches. There was something reassuring about a political party where the leader could be challenged. Even by his own people. Especially by his own people.
I am patiently waiting for the day Donald Trump wakes up, looks out of the White House window, surveys the mess we call civilisation and thinks: You know what this planet really needs? Better branding.
And thus, by executive proclamation, perhaps sometime before lunch, Earth will become Planet Trump.
Why stop at Lake Ontario or the Gulf of Mexico? Why stop at airports, buildings, golf courses and whatever else can be renamed with the subtlety of a property developer putting his name on a condominium? The entire planet is surely the logical next step.
The announcement would probably arrive on social media in the familiar style of a man simultaneously declaring victory and complaining that everyone else is cheating.
“EARTH IS NOW PLANET TRUMP. Nobody has ever renamed a planet before. Very BIG. Very BEAUTIFUL. The greatest planet in the HISTORY of planets. China is jealous. NASA loves it. The Moon called me personally.”
Naturally, the next question would be whether the name could be trademarked.
Of course it could.
Or at least, in the Trumpian universe, the Supreme Court could be asked to make it possible.
Imagine the hearing.
“Your Honour, my client believes the planet should be called Trump.”
“On what constitutional basis?”
“Because he really, really likes the name.”
A solemn silence would descend upon the courtroom.
Then someone would ask whether the other 8 billion inhabitants of Earth had been consulted.
Trump would presumably consider this an outrageous suggestion. Why would they need to be consulted? They already live on his planet.
The oceans could be renamed Trump Oceans, the Atlantic could become Trump Atlantic, and the Pacific could be rebranded Trump Pacific, because apparently even the world's geography must now develop a loyalty programme.
Mount Everest might become Trump Mountain, although that could cause an awkward dispute with the Himalayas, which have stubbornly existed for millions of years without asking permission.
The Sun could perhaps be renamed Trump Star.
The Moon?
Trump Moon.
Mars?
Obviously Trump Mars, because apparently conquering the solar system is easier than solving healthcare.
And somewhere in NASA, exhausted scientists would stare at their computers as centuries of astronomical terminology disappear beneath a giant golden logo.
There would be merchandise.
PLANET TRUMP — LIMITED EDITION EARTH GLOBE.
The irony would be magnificent. Humanity spent thousands of years arguing over philosophy, religion, science, democracy and the meaning of existence, only to discover that the ultimate question of civilisation was apparently: Who owns the trademark on the third rock from the Sun?
But there is a darker joke beneath the absurdity.
A democracy becomes particularly dangerous when political power starts behaving like personal property. When public institutions become props, national symbols become branding opportunities and the distinction between government and personal vanity begins to evaporate.
Eventually, even the planet itself risks becoming another campaign accessory.
The good news is that Earth has survived worse than Donald Trump.
Asteroids.
Ice ages.
Volcanoes.
Dinosaurs.
And, remarkably, humanity.
So perhaps the planet will survive Planet Trump too.
The real concern is what happens afterward.
Because if Trump ever succeeds in trademarking Earth, every alien civilisation approaching our solar system may receive the same message:
WELCOME TO PLANET TRUMP.
PLEASE HAVE YOUR PASSPORT, TAX RETURN AND LAWYER READY.
And somewhere behind Saturn, an alien commander will quietly turn his spaceship around.
There is something especially disturbing about a government striking a fishing boat from the shadows. A warship is visible. A battlefield is recognisable. Even a conventional airstrike carries, however imperfectly, the architecture of accountability. But a small drone arriving over an apparently ordinary fishing vessel, followed by an explosion and silence, belongs to a darker category, violence without a public explanation.
That is why the reported CIA operation against Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands should alarm anyone who still believes that international law is supposed to restrain powerful states rather than merely inconvenience weak ones. The Washington Post has reported that the mysterious attacks earlier this year were connected to a covert CIA programme. Survivors of two March attacks described drones dropping explosives onto their boats, while another vessel disappeared in January with eight crew members still missing.
The obvious question is whether these fishermen were legitimate targets. If the answer is no and the available accounts certainly raise profound doubts, then Washington has a very serious problem.
The United States may call the campaign counter-narcotics. It may invoke intelligence, national security, terrorism or the increasingly elastic vocabulary of the war on drugs. But labels do not magically transform fishermen into combatants. Nor does the CIA badge provide a special exemption from international law.
Indeed, secrecy may make the legal problem worse. Covert action is not synonymous with lawlessness. Intelligence agencies can conduct secret operations that are lawful. But secrecy cannot be used as a substitute for legal authority. If lethal force is employed against civilians outside an armed conflict, the justification must be exceptionally strong. If people are deliberately targeted without sufficient evidence that they pose an imminent threat, the questions become considerably darker.
And then there is the problem of what happened afterward. Survivors have described being intercepted, restrained, hooded and transported before eventually being handed over to Salvadoran authorities. Reuters has separately reported accounts from fishermen who say their boats were searched by Ecuadorian authorities and found not to contain drugs before being attacked.
If those accounts are accurate, this is not merely a story about mistaken intelligence. It is a story about the consequences of allowing secret military power to operate beyond public scrutiny.
America has spent decades lecturing other countries about sovereignty, human rights and the rules-based international order. Those principles cannot become optional when Washington finds the enemy sufficiently unpleasant. The rules-based order is not a subscription service available only to friendly governments.
Nor should Ecuador's cooperation with the United States be mistaken for a blank cheque. A sovereign government cannot outsource responsibility for violence on its territory—or against its citizens at sea—simply because the operation is politically embarrassing.
There is also a strategic absurdity here. Destroying a fishing boat may produce an impressive explosion. It does not destroy the economic conditions, criminal networks and corruption that sustain drug trafficking. Criminal organisations replace boats and recruits far more easily than governments replace trust.
The greatest danger is therefore not only what happened in the Pacific. It is what such operations teach future presidents.
Once governments become comfortable killing first and explaining later, the threshold for violence quietly falls. The secret operation becomes the normal operation. The extraordinary becomes routine. Accountability becomes an obstacle rather than a principle.
That is how democracies drift into the fog. The fishermen of Ecuador deserve answers. So does Congress. So does Ecuador. And, ultimately, so does the American public. A government powerful enough to kill in secret must also be accountable enough to explain why.
The term “talk the talk, walk the walk” is a phrase in English that means a person should support what they say, not just with words, but also through action. Actions speak louder than words.
For more Walk the talk, HERE! For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
My friend, Tunde Ishamuko, is an Ijesha man. He typifies what most Yoruba know about Ijesha people: they are business-minded and stubborn. When you owe an Ijesha money, no matter who you are, be sure he will collect it. His method is simple but effective. He will stay with you, embarrassing you at every turn until you wear out. It is called the -osomalo- debt-collection system. Osomalo crouches before the debtor for as long as necessary to recover the debt.
A few days before the just-concluded Osun governorship election, Tunde Ishamuko sought advice on our common WhatsApp platform, which he set up for friends who are equally stubborn. He wanted to know if he should travel from Ibadan to Ilesha to vote. I told him to go. No matter the reported violence in Osun, he must exercise his franchise.
About two or three days to the election, he posted that he had received a call from his uncle, a -Kabiyesi- in a prominent town in the state. The uncle advised him not to travel home to vote. “I don’t want to lose you,” he said. Around the same time, Tunde said his ATM card had gone missing. He suspected someone in his household had hidden it to prevent him from having money to travel. Fear was rife that Osun would go up in flames.
I immediately reviewed my first advice. If a Kabiyesi had warned him not to go, and if a member of his household, possibly his wife, had hidden his ATM to stop him from traveling, he should consider it wise not to travel. I don’t think he did.
The Osun election has been concluded — though INEC says so, while the APC is threatening to go to court. It had all the trappings of an election that could end Nigeria’s fledgling democracy. Governor Ademola Adeleke, whom the APC wants out of power, warned that if the APC used federal power to manipulate the election, the 1983 post-election violence that helped bring down the Shagari administration and terminate Nigeria’s Second Republic would be “child’s play.”
A few days before the election, INEC said about 40 persons had been murdered on both sides of the divide, APC and Accord. On the eve of the election, scheduled for August 15, it was rumoured that the contractor who designed and printed Accord party face caps had been killed in Ilesha, and that his young family had been moved to another town for safety.
Almost all police commissioners in the 36 states were deployed to Osun to join the state commissioner and take charge of security. There were 25,000 security personnel across the state. Even with that, none of the combatants trusted INEC, the election umpire, or the police. Nigerians across the country stayed glued to their television sets for live coverage. Luckily, apart from a member of the State House of Assembly reportedly arrested with 146 voter cards, there was no major incident. The election went on peacefully under the watchful eyes of the electorate.
The APC marshaled its federal might and deployed a lot of money to crush Ademola Adeleke. It used propaganda to psyche people in and out of the state. It accused the sitting governor of not being serious enough to govern. The APC said he was always dancing and therefore incapable of governing a resource-constrained state in need of urgent attention.
APC leaders imported from the federal level accused Adeleke of neglecting to tar the road into Osogbo, the state capital, from Ibadan. When Senate President Godswill Akpabio said the road that brought him to Osogbo from Ibadan was full of potholes and that Adeleke should be punished, he forgot that it is a federal road and that he is part of the federal team that should take the blame. Akpabio could forget, but Osun citizens who ply that road daily and have lost relatives to accidents did not. They punished the APC with their votes.
The people’s awareness of the issues in their state and who was responsible for what was further demonstrated when they booed the visiting APC governors as they left the state at night after the election. Citizens were captured on camera deriding these governors as they sped out in glittering SUVs.
We must draw lessons from that election for the rest of the country. Nigerians can no longer be taken for granted in political sophistication. Even where formal education is low, political awareness has grown over the years. The North, where citizens have been tied down by various forms of deception and religious fanaticism, should take note. As Osun showed, the people are aware. Through social media they know what is happening in other parts of the country, and they can rise against the leadership of their state. The consequences of a revolt would be devastating for the North.
Osun people were directly affected by 12 years of APC misrule: unpaid salaries and the arbitrary sack of civil servants. When they saw a difference under Adeleke, they decided not to return to the “slavery” of APC. They said it on social media, discussed it in their homes, and voted accordingly. They monitored their votes.
They stood with the man they believed liberated them. Osun shows that issue-based politics is gaining ground in Nigeria. For the first time, we saw a campaign dominated by issues, not abuse and mudslinging — a campaign that gave account of policies.
The election also saw the downfall of men and women who had long dominated the state’s political space.
Former Osun State governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola was rejected even by his people in Ilesha. A politician I met a week before the election noted the absence of the usual crowd at Aregbesola’s house. “I saw about seven cows tied, but the usual dining crowd was absent,” he told a political discussion group I belong to. The group thought it might be because Aregbesola was more in Abuja due to his new role in the ADC, the opposition party he was helping to build after defecting from APC.
But the result in Aregbesola’s polling unit in his Ilesha home tells the truth: it is no longer time to rabble-rouse people with songs by failed politicians. The time and style of Aregbesola and his type have ended in Nigerian politics. He was beaten — he lost in his polling unit and in his town. As a former governor, he failed to serve the people, and they did not forget.
Olagunsoye Oyinlola, also a former governor of Osun who was drafted into the APC after traversing virtually all political parties in the country, was trounced in his polling unit in Okuku. Oyinlola danced and spoke deep proverbs, but the people refused to listen. They went with the man they thought served them better, the man who paid salaries and pensions.
Iyiola Omisore made no impact in Ife, his town. It was not because the APC denied him the governorship ticket. It was because citizens knew his record as former deputy governor, chronicled in the autobiography of Chief Bisi Akande, the governor with whom Omisore served. And though President Bola Tinubu covered for him, and so did former APC Chairman Abdullahi Adamu, the people of Osun knew what led to his removal as APC National Secretary. They were not willing to entrust such a character with their affairs again.
In the Osun election, we see a new Nigeria forming. No more intimidation by an octopus presidency. No tolerance for an indolent INEC. Zero tolerance for a partisan security apparatus. President Tinubu had to call an overzealous EFCC to order after it froze accounts a few days to the election — apparently in fear of the people’s wrath. The wrath was withdrawn, but it is waiting for any president, governor, minister, or local government chairman who will toy with the interest of Nigerians henceforth.
First Published in METRO
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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
There is something almost childishly comic about Donald Trump’s latest contribution to the US-Canadian trade war, if Canada will not bend, perhaps its geography can be punished instead. After negotiations collapsed and Washington imposed 50 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods, Trump suggested that Lake Ontario should henceforth be called “Lake America.” It is the sort of gesture one might expect from a five-year-old who, after losing an argument over a toy, announces that the toy has been renamed in his honour.
Except that the five-year-old is the President of the United States. That distinction turns the joke into something darker. That is the difference between a powerful state and a powerful personality abroad.
A lake does not care what it is called. Lake Ontario, shared by Canada and the United States, has been there considerably longer than either country’s political quarrels. Its name cannot be changed by presidential sulking any more than a child can redraw a border with a crayon. Yet the impulse behind the proposal matters because it reveals a particular conception of power: if something resists you, make it symbolically yours.
This is not diplomacy. It is domination reduced to branding. Trump’s political imagination has always been unusually attracted to names. Names become trophies, declarations of ownership, evidence that the powerful have prevailed. But international relations are not a real-estate brochure. He cannot compel Canadians, international organisations or the rest of the world to abandon a name embedded in history and common usage.
More importantly, the lake is merely the punchline. The serious business is the tariff war. The United States and Canada have spent decades constructing one of the world’s most integrated economic relationships. Cars cross the border several times during production. Energy, metals, agriculture and manufactured goods move through supply chains so interwoven that pretending the two economies can simply be separated is rather like proposing that Siamese twins solve an argument by moving to different houses.
Tariffs are not insults written on envelopes. They become higher costs, disrupted investment, nervous employers and eventually more expensive goods. Canada will suffer. So will US businesses and consumers.
And yet Trump appears to treat every disagreement as a test of personal obedience. Canada is not merely another trading partner; it becomes a defendant. Its refusal to accept Washington’s terms becomes evidence of insolence. The vocabulary shifts from negotiation to submission: fall in line, punish, retaliate, rename.
This is where the childishness becomes dangerous. A spoiled child can throw a tantrum and break a lamp. A president can throw a tantrum and damage alliances, markets and the assumptions on which international stability depends. The United States possesses extraordinary economic, military and diplomatic power. When its president treats that power as an extension of his personal temperament, the world is entitled to worry.
Perhaps Lake Ontario will remain Lake Ontario. Canadians will continue calling it that, and the water will carry on doing what lakes do.
But the episode leaves behind a more troubling question: how much of American power should be devoted to winning arguments that never needed to become wars in the first place?
The answer should be, considerably less. Great powers demonstrate strength by knowing when not to use it. They do not need to rename the lake when they have already got the navy.
