Key events

Having reportedly read Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, in French, during a military tour of duty in Iraq, Jamieson Greer considered himself an unlikely target for accusations of francophobia.

But Donald Trump’s US trade representative, hitherto one of the president’s less high-profile cabinet members, found himself in that uncomfortable position amid the acrimonious collapse of bilateral trade talks with Canada that now threatens to degenerate into an all-out trade war between the two close trading partners whose economies are tightly intertwined.

An apparent pending deal between Washington and Ottawa aimed at avoiding damaging tit-for-tat tariffs broke down at the last minute, with Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, claiming his country had come “under attack” from the US.

Among the multiple and complex points of disagreement was a Canadian accusation that US negotiators had pressed for a weakening of legal protections for the French language, which is most heavily spoken in the province of Quebec.

Canadian provisions include legislation that mandates streaming and online video companies to invest in and promote Canadian content and promote the French language. Carney cast US objections to such regulations as a deal breaker, and said they amounted to “threats to French language and culture”.

For Greer, a fluent French speaker who once served as a Mormon missionary in Belgium, France and Luxembourg, the charge was too much. “I speak French, too,” he told CNBC, dismissing the claims as “a funny, fake story”.

Donald Trump ⁠on Sunday said NBC’s Kristen ‌Welker – host of Meet the Press – should face “rebuke or punishment” from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Welker, during a live segment for a local Washington DC affiliate, described the success record of political candidates whom the president had endorsed as “mixed”. The segment aired prior to Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press.

Trump “is going to loom large over these midterms,” Welker remarked on that live shot. “He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He’s had some mixed results.”

The post also said that Trump hoped his appointed FCC chair Brendan Carr – and Carr’s colleagues on the commission – “take this Threat to our Country very seriously”.

Once Meet the Press actually started on Sunday, a guest analyst on the show said “the single most important factor in who the Republican nominee will be in [the presidential election of] 2028 will be who Donald Trump endorses”.

House Democrat plans to introduce bill to nullify Trump's 'Lake America' executive order

Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.

As House representatives return from the summer recess, one Democrat has already set in motion a plan to nullify Donald Trump’s latest conceited executive order.

The president signed an executive order on Thursday directing the federal government to rename Lake Ontario, making it Lake America, amid his escalating trade war with Canada.

“We have a gulf and we have a lake – now all we need is an ocean. Maybe we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific,” he told reporters, sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. “Maybe we’ll change them both.”

But House Democrat Debbie Dingell said she plans to introduce a bill later today to nullify the name change, titled the “Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act”.

Debbie Dingell Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

“People do not understand how intertwined our two countries are,” Dingell told Politico, adding: “And this is insane, this naming Lake Ontario ‘Lake America.’”

Dingell said she had accrued more than 100 signatures from fellow House Democrats in a letter to the president, urging the Trump administration “to change its diplomatic approach with our closest ally, Canada, and recognize the importance of the United States-Canada relationship”.

“I grew up in a small town called St Clair, and when I got up and looked out my bedroom window every day, I didn’t see America. I saw Canada,” Dingell said. “We lived that close. Canada was as close to us as [the Cannon House Office Building] is to the Capitol.”

Trump’s order directed federal agencies to adopt the name-change on US maps, documents and databases. Google Maps has changed Lake Ontario’s name to Lake America for US users to reflect the president’s executive renaming order.

Meanwhile, the president posted overnight on his Truth Social website:

For many years, the USA has been losing more than 60 Billion Dollars a year with Canada. Why??? Our long ago stolen businesses are now coming back to America in order to avoid paying tariffs. They are lining up, just like the rest of the World!!!

In other developments:

• Trump and Canada continued a verbal duel on Saturday over the US government’s administrative renaming of Lake Ontario, with the Ontario premier erecting a giant sign saying “Lake Ontario. Now and Always” – and the American president posting a video of him tearing down an avatar of that sign, erecting a replacement saying Lake America, and dancing to YMCA. Rhetoric over the naming of Lake Ontario is the public face of an escalating trade dispute between the US and its northern neighbor involving a 50% US tariff on Canadian steel and retaliatory tariffs from Ottawa.

• The White House “border czar,” Tom Homan, denied on Sunday that deporting British far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos just a day after being arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) amounted to preferential treatment. Homan said it was his understanding that Yiannopoulos, 41, had overstayed what he believed to be a visitor visa, had not appeared at an immigration hearing and was issued a final order of removal on 22 July.

• Trump ⁠on Sunday said NBC’s Kristen ‌Welker – host of Meet the Press – should face “rebuke or punishment” from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Welker, during a live segment for a local Washington, DC, affiliate, described the success record of political candidates whom the president had endorsed as “mixed”. The segment aired prior to Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press.

• Michigan’s Democratic US senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed apologized to the state’s Jewish Democratic Caucus on Saturday for comments he made after an attack on a synagogue in March, which he tied to Israel’s actions in the Middle East. “My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify,” El-Sayed told reporters after he addressed the caucus at a party convention in Lansing. “To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I’m really sorry. That was not my intention.”