Would the president change the "Department of Defense" back to the "Department of War"? He sounds increasingly serious about the idea.
In March, Trump and his team got the ball rolling on changing the "Department of Defense" back to the "Department of War."
Three months later, at the NATO summit, he suggested he’s not kidding about this. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...
— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2025-06-25T17:33:06.845Z
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-expresses-interest-rolling-back-clock-bring-back-department-war-rcna215029
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
, “It used to be ‘secretary of war’; then we became politically correct. ‘Secretary of defense,’ maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4llrhdclvdlmmynkwsmg5tdc/post/3lsgsjsiznr2q
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.’”....
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.
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