President Donald Trump’s recent move to call the Department of Defense the “Department of War” is, practically speaking, an elaborate press release.
Much like his move to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” Trump can’t officially change the name without congressional action – which appears unlikely in the Senate.
But the Pentagon name change is instructive in one way: It epitomizes an increasingly militaristic Trump policy, at home and abroad.
He has campaigned for a decade on ending wars and even recently lobbied extensively for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his second term has involved increasingly threatening – and potentially risking – military confrontations.
The bellicose rhetoric has kicked into overdrive in recent days.
On Saturday morning alone came two extremely provocative statements, less than an hour apart. Trump posted a meme of himself transposed into the war movie “Apocalypse Now,” adding, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR” – an apparent reference to his planned deportations in Chicago.
Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, responded to a critic who called the administration’s controversial recent strike on an alleged drug boat from Venezuela a “war crime” by saying, “I don’t give a sh*t what you call it.”
Cabinet officials have also pushed that kind of messaging. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly hailed the need for the Defense Department to play offense.
“We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense,” he said Friday during an Oval Office event for the “Department of War” change.
“Maximum lethality – not tepid legality,” Hegseth added, saying that the idea is to “raise up warriors, not just defenders.”
Earlier last week, he said of Trump’s strike on the boat: “President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not seen.” Trump likewise in his executive action emphasized a desire to be able to “win wars on behalf of our Nation at a moment’s notice, not just to defend.”
And Secretary of State Marco Rubio has cast the developments in the Caribbean as part of a newly launched, modern-day war on drugs – an apparently more literal one.
“We are going to wage combat against drug cartels that are flooding American streets and killing Americans,” Rubio said last week.
It’s always important to separate the rhetoric from the action. Trump has occasionally talked very tough with his foreign policy – he threatened North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with “fire and fury” early his first term – and there can be value in that.
But the administration’s actions are also pointing in a more militaristic direction.
Most notable was the unprecedented and legally dubious military strike on the boat that the administration claims contained Venezuelan “narcoterrorists.”
Tellingly, the administration has largely shrugged off attempts to get it to justify the legality of the strike. It has also essentially admitted that it could have interdicted the boat but decided to strike it instead, in order to send a message to other drug-traffickers.
“And it’ll happen again,” Rubio said Wednesday. “Maybe it’s happening right now.”
In the days since the strike, CNN has reported the administration has also ramped up its forces in the Caribbean, with Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine making a surprise visit to Puerto Rico on Monday to highlight the effort.
Trump is reportedly weighing options for further military strikes against drug cartels operating in Venezuela, including possibly striking within the country’s borders. Rubio last week declined to rule out that latter option, despite the United States not having declared war against Venezuela.
Trump has signaled a desire to target drug smugglers as terrorists, which would greatly expand his legal authority to use the military against them.
And there are plenty of other examples from this year of the president using the military — even on US soil.
After using troops in Los Angeles and Washington, DC, he has flirted with a similar approach in Chicago and other cities. He’s already been rebuked by a judge for his moves in Los Angeles.
And when it comes to action abroad, Trump’s June strikes on Iran’s nuclear program were, like the strikes on the boat in Venezuela, bold and legally questionable, given the lack of congressional approval and evidence that Iran posed a truly imminent threat to the US.
The Iran strikes were a major geopolitical moment that also sparked some criticism of Trump from the American right, arguing that that the US shouldn’t get involved in Israel’s campaign. (On Tuesday, US officials confirmed the Trump administration was notified before Israel launched an unprecedented strike on Doha, Qatar, against senior Hamas leaders, which threatens to jeopardize renewed peace efforts in Gaza.)
Trump set the tone early in the term when, standing next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he stunned many by floating the idea of the United States taking control of Gaza.
Trump has also repeatedly flirted with the possibility of taking control of Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. At multiple junctures, he left open the possibility that they could even be taken by force.
In February, Trump said that “we’re going to take” the Panama Canal back “or something very powerful is going to happen.” And in May, he refused to rule out military force to annex Greenland.
Indeed, perhaps the most surprising aspect of Trump’s inauguration speech back in January was the extent to which it was devoted to taking the Panama Canal and to “Manifest Destiny” — the concept that US expansion is a divine right.
It’s looking more and more like that wasn’t a coincidence. Trump might have backed off on his territorial ambitions, but he’s steadily upped the militaristic ante.