Trump’s Lake America font underscores the new name’s silliness

To announce his executive order renaming Lake Ontario last week, President Donald Trump brought props that wrote out his new name for the lake using his administration’s official font. A typeface chosen to convey seriousness ended up looking like a joke. During an Oval Office signing ceremony Thursday, Trump signed an order making the Interior Department’s Board on Geographic Names rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” amid an escalating trade war between the U.S. and Canada. His visuals for the event included two posters on easels, with text on each written in Instrument Serif, a condensed serif designed by Rodrigo Fuenzalida with direction from Jordan Egstad and released in 2023. It gives the second Trump term the look of an A.I. tech company. One of Trump’s posters showed a map of the Great Lakes region with “Making the Great Lakes Even Greater” written across the top in Instrument Serif and “Lake America” written in a different font inside a big red box like this is a Daily Mail story. The image on the other poster was a close-up map of the lakes, which the White House also shared on social media. While Lakes Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie are all written in this map in a…