Two of Donald Trump’s favorite pastimes (giving things new names and doing stuff that annoys people who didn’t vote for him) converged last week when the president signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” His unsurprising rationale for doing so? “It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound,” he explained to reporters while teasing the news in August. Under the old name, the president said, “We won World War I, we won World War II. We won everything before that and in between.” The signing was followed by a series of remarks from Secretary Pete Hegseth, who suggested it was because the Department of War became the Department of Defense in 1949 that the US failed to win the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War. Hegseth also declared that moving forward, the US armed services will be about “maximum lethality, not tepid legality,” which the International Criminal Court at The Hague might have something to say about.
The name change was, of course, just the latest in a series of rebrands Trump has ordered since his second term began. On his first day in office, he signed an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and changing Denali back to Mount McKinley. This summer, he demanded the owners of the NFL’s Washington Commanders and the MLB’s Cleveland Guardians change their teams’ names back to the Redskins and the Indians, respectively. (They have not.) In February, Hegseth announced that Fort Liberty would once again be known as Fort Bragg (in 2020, Congress passed an amendment to remove the names of Confederate officers from Army bases); months later, Hegseth ordered a ship bearing gay-rights icon Harvey Milk’s name to be changed to one honoring World War II officer Oscar V. Peterson. Meanwhile, GOP representatives have introduced legislation to change the name of Washington Dulles International Airport to Donald J. Trump International Airport, and to make the Kennedy Center Opera House the First Lady Melania Trump Opera House.
It seems unlikely that Trump is going to stop with the Department of War, Mount Mckinley, and the Gulf of America. Other things he could very likely be itching to rebrand include:
• The USS John S. McCain, a Naval destroyer named for the late senator whom Trump trashed for years, even after the guy had died, and which someone in the White House believed needed to be hidden from Trump’s line of sight (new name, probably: the USS I Like People Who Weren’t Captured)
• The Rose Garden (new name, probably: Club Mar-a-Lago Washington)
• The Department of Health and Human Services (new name, probably: the Department of Vaccines Bad, Raw Milk Good, or, for brevity, the Department of Measles)
• The Department of Education (new name, probably: the Department of No More Education)
• The Kennedy Space Center (new name, probably: the Donald “Genius” Trump Space Center)
• The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (new name, probably: the Centers for You Didn’t Really Want Your Medicaid, Did You? Or, if Joni Ernst gets a say: the Centers for We’re All Going to Die Anyway)
• Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (new name, probably: Melania Trump’s School of Government…could be a condition of negotiations)
• The Federal Reserve (new name, probably: QUIT NOW, JEROME POWELL)
• The Lincoln Memorial (new name, probably: the Donald Trump Had It Worse, Y’know, Memorial)
• The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (new name, probably: Bone Spurs Are a Real, Very Serious Condition, How Dare You Suggest Otherwise? Memorial)
