About a month into Donald Trump’s first term, the president bragged at a meeting with business leaders, “I’m good at branding.” As his fellow Republicans have come to learn, he’s actually quite bad at branding.
It would be far more accurate to say that Trump likes to pretend he’s good at branding, and that leads him in some unfortunate directions. NBC News reported on Trump’s upcoming executive order to add “Department of War” as the secondary title of the Defense Department:
The order, which Trump is expected to sign in the Oval Office, won’t rename the Defense Department, but it will authorize Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to use secondary titles like ‘secretary of war’ and ‘Department of War’ in official correspondence and public communications and during formal ceremonies, according to a White House preview of the order. Trump will require all executive departments and agencies to ‘recognize and accommodate these secondary titles in internal and external communications.’
In other words, Team Trump will spend the remainder of his term going along with this wildly unnecessary rhetorical gambit, and congressional Republicans will presumably stick to the same script.
At a White House event last week, a reporter reminded the president that it would require an act of Congress to rename a Cabinet agency. He replied, “We’re just gonna do it.”
The comment now makes more sense: Trump isn’t renaming the department; he’s wrapping a new skin around it like a cheap sedan.
We’ve been headed down this path for much of the year. The first hint came in March, when the president published an item to his social media platform that referred in passing to the Pentagon as “the Department of War.” A few months later, he reiterated his interest in the change and even referred to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of war.”
Trump added at the time, “[I]t used to be ‘secretary of war’; then we became politically correct.” (Kevin Kruse, a historian at Princeton University, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, when historians discuss the National Security Act of 1947, we absolutely stress how the centralization of American military power under the new Department of Defense at the dawn of the Cold War was all about being ‘politically correct.’”)
Last week, the Republican told reporters, repeatedly, that he and his team are “gonna change the name” of the department. “Why are we ‘Defense’? So it used to be called the Department of War, and it had a stronger sound,” Trump said, pining for the days in which “we used to win wars all the time.” The president added, “I don’t want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense, too.”
Stepping back, what we’re dealing with is a president eager to move in two competing directions. On one hand, he’s obviously desperate to receive a Nobel Peace Prize. On the other hand, Trump has also destabilized international alliances and institutions, announced plans to acquire countries that don’t appear to have any interest in joining the United States, launched a preemptive strike against Iran, militarized his own country’s capital, mused about launching military strikes against targets in Mexico and Central America, boasted about a military strike against a civilian boat in international waters and is now rebranding the Pentagon — because “we want offense, too.” If he’s still angling to get that Nobel, he might want to lower his expectations. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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