President Donald Trump in Dearborn, Michigan, January 13, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump's relevance is "declining with every passing moment," according to the D.C. insiders at Pod Save America, as his meager new effort at "trolling" shows just how much he has "lost his fastball" as a public figure.
During the latest edition of the podcast, former Obama administration officials Jon Favreau and Dan Pfeiffer touched on Trump's "losing wars, raising prices and changing maps," noting further that his only public event on Thursday was for an executive order signing to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America." This came as a petulant response to crumbling trade talks with Canada, with Trump adding that he might also consider similar changes for the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Unlike Trump's similar move early in his second term to try and rename the Gulf of Mexico, which drew much scrutiny and public outcry, this alleged change to Lake Ontario has largely failed to draw more than a shrug from most corners of the political world. When pressed to find a serious political implication from this move, which he summed as "dumb s——," Pfeiffer, Obama's former senior communications advisor, suggested that it showed how much Trump's abilities are declining so much that he is even bad at trolling his enemies now.
"Donald Trump's not even good at trolling anymore," Pfeiffer said. "I mean, we've said this before, where he's lost his fastball, but... you can almost feel the relevance just declining with every passing moment that people don't care, and he can't even... Like he does this for outrage. He can't do it."
He added further: "The second thing is that Democrats in the world have kind of figured out how to react to Trump. Like, if when this happened with the Gulf of America, imagine if this happened four years ago. Everyone would be screaming from the rooftops, you know, what a gigantic deal this is. You know, 'What an embarrassment for America. How dare he politicize the once independent board of geographic names and, you know, just like stacking it with cronies. Democracy is at risk. We can't even count on lake-naming anymore.'... Now no one cares."
Pfeiffer also noted that when Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico's name changed to the "Gulf of America" near the start of his second term, numerous news outlets and tech companies ultimately acquiesced to the change, with companies like Google and Apple changing the name of the body of water in their GPS apps. Now, as of Saturday evening, Lake Ontario remains unchanged on both Google Maps and Apple Maps, and the discussion around it potentially changing has been minimal to non-existent.
