What did Donald Trump do today?

He managed to make a nearly defunct navigation app the top download in the United States.

Last month, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on a wide variety of essential Canadian goods, raising prices for American consumers on everything from basic construction materials to specialized medical devices. This outraged the Canadian public and virtually guaranteed that the Liberal government would respond with retaliatory tariffs, rather than accommodating Trump's demands.

Trump was left with no stronger response than to mockingly—but officially, for US government purposes—"rename" Lake Ontario to Lake America.

That act of trolling has had a few interesting consequences. The most predictable one is that Canadian resolve was hardened even further, with spontaneous boycotts of American goods arising. Needless to say, Canadian approval of the Liberal government's decision to impose retaliatory tariffs is high. Much more surprisingly, a plurality of Americans also approve of Canada's government matching Trump's tariffs. 

It also highlighted the extent to which Trump has corrupted the independence that the private sector once had from government interference. Apple Maps and Google Maps both changed their products to show "Lake America" to US clients. There is no legal requirement that they do so, and public opinion of Trump's gesture is extremely low. But Trump has made no secret of his willingness to punish companies that aren't willing to make political gestures of submission to him.

But that has created an opportunity for MapQuest, a pioneer in internet maps that most Americans haven't used in twenty years. While it gets its location data from the same federal database as Google and Apple, it has refused to change its name for Lake Ontario, just as it refused last year to re-label the Gulf of Mexico at Trump's demand. Effectively "too small to fail" from Trump retaliation, MapQuest has leaned into its choice, publicly announcing its decision by tweeting "We're not changing it."

Americans have responded by making its app—which previously saw a few hundred downloads a day—the most popular app of any kind on Apple's own platform today, and fifth on Android as of this posting. Another way of saying that is that downloads are up about 160,000%.

Changing the default map software on a phone won't really hurt Trump, or Google or Apple for that matter, but it's still an ominous sign for Trump that this kind of organic protest against him can catch on so quickly. He remains at the lowest levels of support any president has ever had going into midterm elections—including himself during his first term, when Democrats gained 41 seats in the House of Representatives.

MapQuest has also been allowing users to create custom maps "renaming" Lake Ontario as they like. Some recent examples:

 

Why does this matter?

• You can't win trade wars—or real wars—with internet trolling, and nobody stupid enough to think you can should be president. 

• Making everyone pretend to love the leader or be punished is what happens in fascist dictatorships.