War Games

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.)