Day four of the US-Canada trade war, and here's where we are: on Monday Trump threatened to raise tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks, parts and steel to 50 percent starting January 1. Canada has scheduled dollar-for-dollar retaliation for September 8. And on Tuesday morning, the president proposed renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America." That last part is real. Now the coverage. * CNN's headline: "Trump floats renaming Lake Ontario to 'Lake America' as feud with Canada escalates." In the body, the lake post is his "latest jab." Feud. Jab. This is the vocabulary of celebrity beef — of rappers trading diss tracks, of two housewives who won't sit at the same dinner. It's how you file a story when you've decided it's entertainment. * Now read what CNN's own paragraphs say the "feud" contains: an instruction that someone should get "these clowns" to "fall in line" or Canada faces consequences "far WORSE." A sitting premier dismissed as the "less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother" of Rob Ford. A 50 percent tariff pointed at another country's auto industry. A feud is symmetric — that's the whole point of the word. Two families, two egos, six of one. When one party runs the world's largest economy and is dictating obedience terms to the other, "feud" isn't a neutral container. It's a blame-splitter. * And "jab" — a jab is the lightest punch in boxing, the one you throw to pass the time. The "jab" in question is the President of the United States announcing, in writing, that "we don't expect to doing much business with Ontario any longer." (Grammar his. The lake, presumably, will get a copy editor before the new signage.) * For contrast, here's AP's headline on the same escalation: "Trump tells Canada to 'fall in line' as Carney rejects subordination." No feud, no jab, no boxing. A command, quoted as a command, and a response, named as a response. Same facts, and the reader walks away knowing who demanded what from whom — which is the one thing "feud" is built to blur. * Credit where due: CNN's business desk spent the same day doing honest, unglamorous work — "Trump is threatening new Canadian auto tariffs. That will hurt US automakers and workers." Consequences, named, including for the home team. The reporting is there. It's the politics desk's front-page framing that keeps filing a trade war between the world's two largest trading partners under Celebrity News. * We've been tracking the vocabulary all week: NBC had Trump "hitting back" at a fight he started. NBC heard "miscalculation" at the podium where NPR heard "at war." Now CNN hears a "feud." Every choice moves the story one notch further from statecraft and one notch closer to content. The tariffs, meanwhile, remain scheduled. * Renaming somebody else's lake is, admittedly, very feud-coded behavior. But "feud" does one specific job in that headline: it saves the desk from deciding who started it. September 8 won't be that polite.