Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump rechristened the Department of Defense as the War Department. To drive the point home, the White House X account shared an image of the president squatting in sunglasses and a cavalry hat against a backdrop of helicopters, explosions, and the Chicago skyline—a parody of the film Apocalypse Now. The caption read, “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago [sic] about to find out why it’s called the Department of War.”
That same week the U.S. military killed the crew of an alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boat in international waters. Asked on X whether the strike amounted to a war crime, the vice president, a Yale-trained lawyer, replied, “I don’t give a shit what you call it.”
However, it wasn’t Trump’s drone strike that drew the most ire but his decision to rename the Department of Defense. To be clear, the executive order directs the government to use “Department of War” and “Secretary of War” as secondary titles, but they are effectively the primary names. Stripping out “Department of Defense” entirely will require Congress to pass legislation. Maybe lawmakers will oblige, but at this point it’s almost a distinction without a difference. After all, why would a president wait on Congress for a name change when they don’t wait on Congress to wage acts of war abroad? Congressional action in matters of defense has increasingly been reduced to technicalities and messaging, apart from the entropic spending packages it passes.
The Department of War was created in 1789, overseeing the U.S. Army and later the Army Air Forces, while the Department of the Navy handled the fleet. In 1947, the War Department was split into the departments of the Army and Air Force, with the new Defense Department, given its eventual name in 1949, created as an umbrella agency overseeing all the armed forces. Trump’s move is less a restoration than a renaming, justified, according to his executive order, because it supposedly “ensures peace through strength.”
As one commentator in the Atlantic rightly noted, the first name change from War Department to Defense Department recognized that there was a lot more to the defense of the nation than simply fighting wars and that reversing it now will waste a huge amount of money in administrative costs all in the name of cringey semantics. Wasting millions of dollars on a useless Pentagon activity might turn more heads if it weren’t so commonplace.
Yet criticism should also acknowledge that the Department of Defense has been behaving like a Department of War for quite a long time—much of it overseen and enabled by graduates of the same elite institutions that produced the vice president. John Yoo, architect of the George W. Bush administration’s torture memos, is a fellow Yale Law alumnus. John Ashcroft, who defended them as attorney general, studied at Yale and the University of Chicago. Alberto Gonzales, another Bush attorney general, trained at Harvard before dismissing parts of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint” and “obsolete.”
Under President Barack Obama, Martin Lederman, who studied law at Yale, and David Barron, who studied at Harvard, authored the memo justifying the unprecedented drone strike on U.S. citizen and alleged al Qaeda member Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, followed two weeks later by a strike that killed his 16-year-old American son. When asked about the boy’s death, former White House press secretary and senior campaign advisor Robert Gibbs remarked that the teenager “should have [had] a far more responsible father.”
So why would the vice president “give a shit” whether the extraterritorial killing of alleged drug traffickers in open waters qualifies as a war crime? To be fair, the former officials I’ve named grappled with unprecedented policy questions, charged with protecting the homeland following 9/11 and making choices few would envy. And yes, elite institutions have also produced champions of humanitarian law and military oversight. But the notion that the ideas circulating in Trump’s Pentagon are some aberrant break from the norm is a self-serving myth.
If Congress wanted the “Department of War” to live up to the more palatable “defense” moniker, it’s had ample chances. Instead, lawmakers have ceded their constitutional war powers, allowing presidents of both parties to launch military action without approval. The Obama administration’s 2011 airstrikes against the Qaddafi regime in Libya, Trump’s 2020 assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani in Iraq, and Bill Clinton’s 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo—initiated before Congress weighed in—are just three examples.
Each produced significant regional and political consequences, in some cases arguably leading to the loss of U.S. life, while relying on Article II authorities and expansive interpretations of earlier congressional authorizations, effectively making Congress’s voice irrelevant. Oversight has amounted to little more than partisan scolding when the other side controls the White House. The one constant has been the steady expansion of presidential war-making authority—perhaps now too entrenched to undo.
The U.S. airstrikes on Iran in June are only the latest example. A Senate motion (S.J. Res. 59) to invoke the War Powers Resolution and withdraw U.S. forces from unauthorized hostilities against Iran failed 47-53; the House never even voted. Congress has also repeatedly balked at repealing outdated Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs)—passed in 1991, 2001, and 2002—that have been stretched far beyond their original purposes. These AUMFs, particularly those created at the inception of the global war on terror (GWOT), have become like holy writ, documents frozen in time yet endlessly reinterpreted to justify new military action.
As I’ve recently argued, the rhetoric, imagery, and, perhaps most disturbingly, the tactics that defined Washington’s wars of choice abroad, especially during the GWOT era, are coming home. Last weekend they did again, in the form of Trump’s Apocalypse Now meme. It looked less like political messaging than a propaganda flyer one might drop to demoralize an enemy city. Only this time, the target was Chicago.
The imagery was grotesque, and partisan outrage followed. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote on X that the “President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries echoed the charge. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a decorated Army veteran, accused Trump of stolen valor for having his (likely AI-generated) cavalry hat.
But this chorus of condemnation largely missed the point. Trump is not literally declaring war on Chicago. He is vulgarly signaling his intent to deploy U.S. troops to assist other agencies in carrying out mass deportations, in the same way as efforts underway in Washington, D.C. The meme succeeded in rallying supporters behind the policy while baiting opponents into focusing on optics rather than the duty to oversee how the U.S. military is used. And in the noise, what gets lost? Any serious oversight of how the U.S. military is deployed abroad or at home.
Lawmakers and commentators may profess outrage over last week’s events. However, for a quarter-century, the Department of Defense and other agencies waged undeclared wars and carried out lethal strikes across the globe while Congress abdicated oversight, pundits cheered, critics were derided as unserious, and presidential power over who lives, who dies, and who is locked away at Guantánamo hardened into something close to absolute.
Now we’ve arrived at the destination that was locked in all along: The White House is crudely telling us that it can do whatever it wants with the U.S. military, and nobody can restrain it.