America's newest superpower weapon: semantics

In keeping with his devotion to brand over substance — the latter, dauntingly, calls for genuine effort wrapped in competence — Trump has unlawfully (another devotion) renamed the Department of Defense to that of War. Pete's happy; he gets a brand new title, too.

Switching the DOD's name to its throwback requires congressional approval, or it did when the U.S. was a nation of laws (and technically still is). Such was a constitutional blueprint that Trump has found most inconvenient and downright disagreeable. Thus technically, yeah, his rechristening of DOD is unlawful, but "we're just going to do it," he said. And he did.

His reasoning gestated in the natural order of things, which is to say, it was impeccably Trumpian — the stuff that dreamy incoherence is made of. "Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War," he reminisced last month. "Then we changed it to Department of Defense,” he added, suggesting a causal link between Pentagon door signage and military defeat.

Yesterday Trump sort of delineated his concept of America's martial history, that being akin to his 2024 "concepts of a [healthcare] plan" — abject vacuity. “We won World War II. We won everything before," he blithered ahead of illegally signing away "Defense." The U.S. did not, of course, "win every [war] before" the Good War. Among those officially (i.e., constitutionally) declared there was the former-family squabble commencing in 1812 and drawing to a stalemated close in late 1814.    

Five'll get you 10 that Trump would be unable to name the five declared wars he's mistakenly puffed up about: the above, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the First and Second World Wars. Another safe bet: Trump hasn't the vaguest knowledge of the Brits having burned the White House, of the first American Texans being "illegal aliens," of the weak and ramshackle state of the Spanish "empire," of the idiotic Zimmermann Telegram, or of what the "Triple Axis" denoted (no, Donald, not the nuclear triad).

There were undeclared wars but wars nonetheless hatched just before and throughout the 19th century, about which Trump assuredly hasn't a clue and which the U.S. either lost or came up short of an unambiguous "win"; a few were the seafaring Quasi War of 1798-1800 with France, resolved not by things that go boom but a treaty calling it quits — a treaty unsatisfactory to Congress, hence unratified; the Seminole Wars, one of which saw a combined Army-Marine force humiliated by a plucky native contingent less than a tenth its size ...

also the late 1850s Utah War (those pesky Mormons), otherwise known as "Buchanan's Blunder" – enough said; the Colorado War, in which victory against indigenous tribes evaded the U.S. Army, although one commanding officer managed to slaughter scores of "enemy" women and children; and in Red Cloud's War, the U.S. lost, end of story (for a while).

About post-1945 wars — pardon, the "conflicts" of Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — Trump whipped out the choleric historical humbug of "we were very strong, but we never fought to win. We just didn’t fight to win." That would be news to, say, Gen. Westmoreland, whose more than a half-million troops and relentless mass bombing failed to subdue the North and Viet Cong.

The Iraq War we lost before winning it; still, not much of a contest against a third-rate army. And the Afghanistan debacle is on Donald as one of its contemporaneous U.S. commanders in chief (insert facepalm here). That said, defeat was inevitable, something the British Empire and Soviet Union would have told W., Dick, Wolfie and another Donald, if only they had asked.

But Trump is at his most offensive when at his racist best. "We decided to go woke and we changed the name to DOD," he sputtered, which means that according to Trump, President Truman went objectionably woke by integrating the Armed Services in rough concurrence with renaming the Department of War.

Truman's overdue act of ending the military's segregated forces was, however, one of substance. And when it comes to that sort of thing, Donald J. Trump is George W. Bush many times over: all hat, no cattle — but the branding iron? That he has.

* This piece is cross-posted at Substack. Subscribe to be notified of new posts.