U.S. President Donald Trump reacts during a meeting with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Micheal Martin at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 17, 2026. REUTERS Evan Vucci
Conservative Dispatch writer Nick Catoggio is no fan of President Donald Trump. But some rants go further than others, and Trump’s recent behavior clearly sent Catoggio into a frenzy.
Trump fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George earlier this year, in part because he refused to rescind the recommendations for promotion he had made on behalf of several officers, two of them Black and two of them women — which Catoggio said in Pete Hegseth’s “anti-DEI” military made them “presumptively unqualified.”
“Firing a capable officer like Randy George is bad. Firing him because he didn’t show proper respect for Kid Rock is so unbearably humiliating for the United States that I feel it in my chest,” growled Catoggio. “‘Shameful’ isn’t the right word, as shame implies a sense of guilt over some serious offense for which you feel directly or indirectly responsible. … The George episode isn’t so much shameful as it is pathetic. It betrays a bratty juvenile fatuousness that’s only possible in political leaders who fundamentally don’t grasp, or actively disdain, the concept of dignity.”
But while America has had periods of weakness, Catoggio said it’s never been a laughingstock in his lifetime. Of course, that was before “Lake America.”
“If the ‘Gulf of America’ rebrand was a declaration of triumph, the targeting of Lake Ontario is a declaration of defeat,” said Catoggio. “It was inspired, of course, by the stupid-even-for-him new trade war the president has launched against Canada. … [C]hanging the name of Lake Ontario reeks of impotence and humiliation. It’s transparently an act of spite by a man-baby who’s lashing out after failing to get his way. And it’s a boost for his domestic opponents on the left, who already planned to campaign this fall on the idea that the president is too absorbed with trivial idiocy like ballrooms — and now lakes — to address the problems he was elected to solve.”
And it a move that’s entirely phone and bitter, Catoggio adds. What separates yesterday’s “patheticness from the right’s embrace of ‘freedom fries’ to spite France in the early days of the Iraq war’ is that the earlier nonsense was an “informal grassroots attempt to change the culture by pressuring people not to use the word ‘French.’”
“But ‘Lake America’? That’s an official order from the president,” said Catoggio. “Let the culture take note.”
Worse, Trump’s “bratty” Lake America ‘fiasco’ is ultimately an act of cowardice, said Catoggio.
“[C]ommitted nationalists aren’t squeamish about sacrifice and immiseration. If they wanted to fight a trade war with Canada, they’d go a lot further in escalating than hollow gestures involving lake names,” said Catoggio. “Trump is squeamish, though. His brand of ‘luxury nationalism’ comes packaged with a con man’s promise that Americans will suffer no enduring hardship from his agenda. He couldn’t be any plainer than he’s been this summer about how frightened he is by what protracted economic suffering caused by his policies might do to his legacy.”
But Trump needs ways to look tough that won’t cost Americans anything, said Catoggio, and erasing the word “Ontario” from the Great Lakes is ‘zero-calorie nationalism — unappetizing, unsatisfying, but chauvinistically nourishing with little downside.”
“Only a pathetic and ignorant people would have fallen for [what Trump sells],” Catoggio said, “and only a really pathetic and really ignorant people would have fallen for it twice. Say what you will about Trump, but don’t ever say that he hasn’t delivered what Americans voted for.”