Trump says he wants ‘Department of War’ instead of defense department

Donald Trump just said for the third time today that he plans to rebrand the “Department of Defense” by returning to the pre-1947 name, the “Department of War”.

The president, whose pre-politics business career was largely focused on marketing, first raised the idea on Monday morning, while signing executive orders in the Oval Office with his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, standing behind him.

“So Pete, you started off by saying the ‘Department of Defense’, and somehow it didn’t sound good to me, you know, it didn’t sound good. ‘Defense’ what are we ‘defense’, why are we ‘defense’? So it used to be called the ‘Department of War’ and it had a stronger sound”, the president said.

He then told the handful of officials lined up behind him – namely: JD Vance, the vice-president; Pam Bondi, the attorney general; Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary; Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff; Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration; and Hegseth – “if you people want to, standing behind me, if you take a little vote and you want to change it back to what it was when we used to win wars all the time, that’s okay with me”.

Later, while taking questions alongside the president of South Korea, Lee Jae Myung, Trump again raised the idea, out of the blue.

“Pete Hegseth has been incredible with the, as I call it, the ‘Department of War’. You know, we call it the ‘Department of Defense’, but, between us, I think we’re going to change the name”, Trump said during a riff about border security.

By way of explanation, the president added: “We won the World War I, World War II, it was called the ‘Department of War’. And to me, that’s really what it is”.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/866ilSBIVCE?wmode=opaque&feature=oembedDonald Trump said on Monday that he wants to change the name of the ‘Department of Defense’ back to the ‘Department of War’.

Trump raised the idea a third time during a meeting on Monday afternoon with family members of 13 US military personnel who were killed by an Islamic State suicide bomber, along with 170 Afghan civilians, at Hamid Karzai International Airport’s Abbey Gate in 2021, as the US withdrew its forces from Afghanistan.

Asked by a reporter how he plans to rename the defense department the ‘Department of War’, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that”.

“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate… the other is, ‘Defense is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better”.