Donald Trump and his team have been fixated in recent months on renaming things. From the Gulf of Mexico to the USNS Harvey Milk, from Veterans Day to the Persian Gulf, the president and his administration have made it painfully clear: They’re not satisfied with names and labels that much of the public finds familiar, and they’re eager to impose new ones.

Evidently, we can add the name of one of the nation’s oldest departments to the list. USA Today reported:

President Donald Trump suggested changing the name of Defense Department back to its pre-World War II moniker as the War Department, after the success in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. ‘You know it used to be called secretary of war,’ Trump told reporters June 25 at the conclusion of a NATO meeting in the Netherlands. ‘Maybe for a couple of weeks we’ll call it that because we feel like warriors.’

The Republican did not appear to be kidding. In fact, at his NATO press conference, the American president referred to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of war” and reflected on the title that hasn’t existed in a few generations. Trump added, “[I]t used to be ‘secretary of war’; then we became politically correct. ‘Secretary of defense,’ maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”

While it’s true that the United States had a Department of War, which was renamed in the years following World War II, it’s also worth noting how absurd his interpretation of modern history is. Kevin Kruse, a historian at Princeton University, sarcastically explained via Bluesky, “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.’”

But while Trump’s understanding of the relevant details is obviously wrong, I don’t think this was just an offhand thought for him.

A few months ago, there were multiple reports that Elon Musk — at the time, a White House official with the president’s ear — was poised to receive a briefing on China at the Pentagon, despite his deep financial ties to the country. Trump was apparently not pleased, and he expressed his dissatisfaction in a lengthy online rant, much of which was forgettable.

The missive, however, concluded that Musk would not be briefed on China “by the Department of War.”

It was easy to assume that Trump was simply confused, and that the phrasing didn’t have any larger significance, until roughly 12 hours later when Hegseth published an unscientific poll via social media, asking whether “Department of War” would be a “better name.”

People were invited to vote on whether the department should keep its current name or go back to its old one. (As of this writing, the latter was ahead with 54% support.)

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Musk weighed in soon after, arguing that it would be “more accurate” to call it the Department of War.

That wasn’t altogether true — many of the military’s missions are unrelated to combat — but the engagement suggested that Team Trump was taking this rather seriously.

It was against this backdrop that the president returned to the subject again at the NATO summit, three months after first broaching the subject in public.

I’m not making any predictions about the White House’s next moves, especially given Trump’s limited attention span, but if he actually tries to roll back the clock on the department’s name — because, as the president put it, he and his team “feel like warriors” — no one should say we weren’t warned.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.