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Last week, in international waters, the US military blew up a boat that officials alleged was a drug-running vessel from Venezuela, killing all eleven people on board. The administration did not provide tangible evidence for its claims, but that didn’t stop Trump from posting a video to Truth Social showing the moment of impact, or Vice President JD Vance writing on X that such strikes constitute “the highest and best use of our military.” When Brian Krassenstein, a prolific anti-Trump poster whose name might ring a bell from the Twitter wars of Trump’s first term (and who is still very much at it), pointed out that “killing the citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime,” the basic decorum of high office didn’t stop Vance from replying: “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”

While all this was unfolding, the Trump administration was very much giving a shit what you call the arm of government that oversaw the strike. On Friday, Trump signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” (Well, re-renaming: the US had a Department of War until the 1940s, when the different branches of the armed forces were consolidated under what was known as the National Military Establishment, or NME; fearing that that initialism would be confused with the venerable British music magazine of the same name—or the word “enemy”; who can say?—officials soon changed the new entity’s name to “Department of Defense.”) “We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between, and then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to DOD,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Friday. “So we’re going ‘Department of War.’” By that point, a rebranding effort was already well underway. Pete Hegseth, the Fox & Friends host turned defense (sorry, war) secretary, returned to his old stomping ground to roll the pitch. (“We think words and names and titles matter,” he said, before attempting to tease an upcoming change to the signage behind him by pointing over the wrong shoulder.) Administration accounts spliced that interview into a Hollywoodesque hype video with pounding music and posted it online, alongside Hollywoodesque footage of Hegseth firing a gun, and a Hollywoodesque poster of Trump glowering. Over the weekend, Trump made the Hollywood connotations alarmingly literal, posting a meme that invoked Apocalypse Now and threatening that Chicago was about to find out “why it’s called the Department of WAR.” (“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” the caption read.)

The Department of Defense—sorry, War—also got busy rebranding its social media accounts and office signage, the low-hanging fruit in a global exercise that could, if pushed to its logical conclusion, prove a logistical nightmare and cost billions of dollars; Politico speculated that the department may have to update the seals adorning some seven hundred thousand facilities worldwide, not to mention letterhead, jackets, napkins, and “the keychains and tchotchkes in the Pentagon store.” (Trump downplayed concerns about the cost, adding, “We don’t have to re-carve a mountain or anything.” That, presumably, will come later.) The renaming also poses a logistical challenge for the news media, which must now decide whether to go along with it in its day-to-day copy; this is the sort of question that has long reared its head—in 2023, for instance, I explored a surprisingly nuanced debate as to whether news organizations should follow the US State Department in referring to the nation of Turkey using its government’s preferred spelling of “Türkiye”—but has grown fraught under Trump, who, of course, recently punished the Associated Press for declining to honor his executive order rebranding the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” It’s not hard to imagine Trump trying to enforce the “Department of War” appellation in similar ways—already, an official quoted in Politico’s story requested that the outlet use it—though, Fox aside, major outlets, including the AP, referred to Hegseth as the “defense” secretary while covering his visit to Puerto Rico yesterday. (Of course, news organizations could sidestep the whole controversy by continuing to refer to “the Pentagon”—at least until the administration brands regular polygons woke.)

The rebrand may sound—and, on some level, absolutely is—very silly: a predictable move for a military apparatus that is ultimately led by a pair of TV stars obsessed with looking and sounding cool. (The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols suggested, not unfairly, that the Pentagon be renamed the “Department of Cringe” instead.) And yet there are serious stakes here. First, this administration has obliterated any remaining line between the optics of governing and its substance, rendering the former key to understanding the latter. Second, the name change is not yet official; making it so ought to require an act of Congress, and Republican lawmakers are already proposing to oblige, but the administration has also reportedly considered ways it might avoid a vote. (For now, the language of Trump’s executive order establishes “Department of War” and its secretarial analogues as “secondary” titles—or, as Politico’s Paul McLeary put it, “nicknames.”) In this light, going along with the change could perhaps be seen as an implicit, if unwitting, endorsement of Trump’s aggressive executive unilateralism—a relatively minor one, to be sure, but one that nonetheless speaks to the biggest overarching story of this moment, and the debatable levels of urgency with which the media is covering it, as I explored in yesterday’s newsletter. To borrow from Hegseth, words and names and titles do matter—and so does the separation of powers.

The symbolism of the name change is also important. The administration and its allies have sought to sell it as an endorsement of the “peace through strength” approach that they see as defining Trump’s “America First” credo. (Trump, of course, has bragged about ending various wars since returning to office; his obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize is, at this point, a meme.) And yet, as many observers have pointed out, the name “Department of War,” at least on its face, connotes a proactively bellicose posture, as does some of the language that the administration has used to justify it. (Hegseth summarized the underlying philosophy as “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality; violent effect, not politically correct.”) Some observers have suggested that the new name is appropriate not only in a Trumpian sense, but in a historical one, too. Dan Caldwell—a former Hegseth adviser last seen being marched out of the Pentagon as part of a highly confusing investigation into supposed leaks to the press (something Caldwell has denied doing)—noted on X that the US “became a much more interventionist power” after the Department of Defense was born in the aftermath of the Second World War. “Renaming DoD the Department of War is just acknowledging the reality of what DoD’s actual role has been the last 80 years.”

Various members of the media also saw the change as appropriate. The editorial board of the Washington Post described it as “a worthy blow against government euphemism” and expressed optimism that it would clarify not only the department’s priorities, but remind Americans that its actions are supposed to be subject to congressional oversight, and, perhaps, of the stakes of Trump sending the National Guard into US cities. (“Even the Washington Post loves the Department of War,” Hegseth crowed on X, causing me to wonder whether he’d actually read the editorial.) Various left-wing commentators welcomed the new name, too—also for reasons of clarity, but from an explicitly anti-interventionist perspective. In an essay for Current Affairs headlined “Yes, Please Call It the War Department,” Nathan J. Robinson pointed out that voices on the left have long disdained the “Defense” appellation—to the point, sometimes, of refusing to use it—as a soft rhetorical cover for the aggressive military actions that the US has often waged, adding that Trump has (if only inadvertently) eliminated “an Orwellian propaganda term” and aided those making the case that Congress should cut back on military spending. In The Guardian, Judith Levine wrote that “an administration that habitually calls things the opposite of what they are” (see: the Department of Government Efficiency) was, “for once, speaking truth.” A headline in the New Republic declared the renaming “the Most Honest Thing Trump Has Ever Done.”

A few years back, I used similar language to refer to a famous comment that Trump once made in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, when he pushed back on a description of Vladimir Putin as a “killer” by pointing out that the US has “a lot of killers” and asking, “You think our country’s so innocent?” This, I wrote, was perhaps the “most profound” truth “of a presidency defined by thousands of lies.” In the same article, I pointed out that Trump had somehow accumulated a reputation, in parts of the media, as an isolationist despite having taken aggressive military actions as president, not least when he decided, in 2020, to assassinate the top Iranian general Qassem Suleimani; since returning to office, Trump has further belied this narrative, not least by bombing Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Over the years, I’ve often been critical of mainstream outlets for pushing a pro-intervention agenda—indeed, I referenced the Trump/O’Reilly exchange in the midst of the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, in 2021, a story that, I have argued, inspired a wave of saber-rattling in the US press disguised as a concern for the Afghan people that, conveniently, has not recurred at similar scale since. In the past, hawkish pundits have been known to praise Trump’s bombing runs as the most normal thing about his presidency(ies). At least sometimes, however, Trump’s erratic nature and flagrant lawlessness have inspired media caution, or at least skepticism, at moments of high tension on his watch. 

Which brings us to this moment of high tension, with Trump saber-rattling against a US city—however seriously (despite his Apocalypse Now post, he dismissed the idea that he was threatening war as “fake news” when NBC’s Yamiche Alcindor asked him about it, calling her “darling” and “second rate” in the process)—and actually unleashing war on a boatload of alleged drug smugglers, without a scintilla of due process and with the explicit acknowledgment that denying due process was a choice. Trump’s Chicago post was, understandably, a big story; the boat strike, to my mind, could have been covered with much more visibility and urgency, though it did get quite a lot of coverage, and at least some of this was skeptical of the stated legal rationale for the strike, which seemed to revolve around the flimsy argument that it was okay because the people on board were terrorists because the US government said so. While the press going along with Trump’s “Department of War” conceit might feel like indulging a form of nominative lawlessness, doing so might ultimately help illuminate a much more consequential form of lawlessness—one practically telegraphed in Hegseth’s recent remarks—that is currently being waged in America’s name. Of course, closely interrogating the underpinning military conduct matters most of all. The many victims of American adventurism overseas can’t give a shit what you call the department responsible for it.

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