Late last week, Trump announced that he would changing the name of the Department of Defense, and—in his latest perverse trip down memory name—rebranding it with its old name of the Department of War. That moniker was shed during Harry Truman’s tenure, shortly after the Second World War—not to soften up the US military in the days when the US had a nuclear weapons monopoly, but to consolidate a slew of semi-autonomous agencies and military branches into one coordinated department.
SFR
In addition to Trump’s military ego-trip being a royal waste of money, on a par with his much ballyhooed birthday military parade—every piece of Pentagon hardware, real estate, Pentagon seal, uniform, paper file will have to be renamed, at a price tag estimated to be over $1 billion—it also sends the world a stunningly brutalist message. America, which already spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined, and which is already committed to a multi-trillion-dollar upgrade of its nuclear weapons systems, is now replacing the name “defense,” with “war.” Or, to put it another way, it is abandoning the nod to the notion, however fictive it may have always been, that America uses its military to protect itself and its allies, rather than to deliberately and proactively harm others, and replacing it with the message to the world that the country, with its newly articulated America First philosophy, is now going to throw its military might around with utter abandon, just because it can.
Think this change is insignificant? Look at what happened in the Caribbean earlier in the week, when a small boat which US electronic eavesdropping had ostensibly identified as a Venezuelan drug-runners’ vessel, was blown out of the water by US firepower, killing all 11 people on board. There was no effort to interdict the ship and its crew instead; no warnings to stop or be fired on. This was, quite simply, an assassination mission, carried out by US military assets in international waters.
When Vice President JD Vance was asked about this action meeting the definition of a war crime, he responded that “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” There wasn’t even a pretense at concern for international legal norms. On social media he posted that it was “the highest and best use of our military.”
This is the quintessential expression of the “might is right” philosophy that has always characterized strong-man regimes—and that, with good reason, small-government conservatives used to warn of on a near-daily basis. It is the notion that, because we have the firepower, we can do anything, no matter the legal stench the action emits. Again, those erstwhile small-government folks on the right have gone remarkably quiet now that their caudillo is spewing about his jackboot fantasies.
Days later, a seemingly unhinged Donald Trump went onto Truth Social to parody Apocalypse Now and continue his tirade against the city of Chicago, which he has erroneously declared to be the most dangerous city on earth. Trump’s already put military boots on the ground in Los Angeles and DC. Now he wants to target the Windy City—and, reputedly, many other Democrat-led cities. Teasing the coming federal anti-immigration and more general law enforcement assault on Chicago, which he has hyped for weeks on end, Trump wrote “I love the smell of deportations in the morning. Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” It was followed by three military helicopter emojis and accompanied by an image of Trump cosplaying as Col. Kilgore from Apocalypse Now and the phrase “Chipocalypse now.”
This insane posting, so utterly beneath the dignity of the office of the President of the United States—not to mention so dismissive of the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting use of the military for domestic law enforcement—occurred during a period when Trump and his minions were repeatedly letting it be known that they thought he ought to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (though, disingenuously, Trump denies coveting the prize).
It’s pretty much impossible to overstate the nuttiness of all of this, the sheer degradation of the way the president—the public face of America—talks and writes, and of the debasement of a White House communications infrastructure that then takes these rants and turns them into official pronouncements. Idiocracy doesn’t even begin to do justice to this.
Perhaps some readers recall Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch, in which a disgruntled pet shop customer, played by John Cleese, comes up with every euphemism for death that he can think of to explain to the store owner that he had been sold a dead parrot.
One could all-too-easily create a similar sketch about how the American public have been sold an insane president: he’s loopy, mad as a march hare, dotty, out for lunch. He’s got a screw loose. He’s been puffing on too many funny cigarettes. He’s kooky, he’s wacko, he’s daffy. The man’s not all there. He’s bonkers. He’s gone bananas.
Apparently, according to the AI summary of euphemisms for madness, there’s even the phrase “He’s crazier than an outhouse fly.” I’m not quite sure what that last one means, but I’m guessing it’s something to do with a willingness to take sustenance from excrement. If so, that certainly seems to fit the Trumpian bill here.
