During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised he would create a new Pax Americana — a MAGA/America First Golden Age — where America’s “stupid endless wars” would be over. In this new era, there would be peace in Ukraine. Order would be restored to the Middle East. No foreign power would be foolish enough to challenge this new world order, or “the killers” and “mad dog” generals he pledged to put in charge of the American military. In Trump’s fantasy, he would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course, none of this has happened.
Foreign policy is a type of signaling game that should clearly communicate intentions and consequences. Trump is erratic and impulsive, and he views public policy and the world as a type of stage for his personal entertainment and power plays. Plot twists and other surprises may make for good television. But they are horrible for statecraft.
Authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin see Trump as malleable — easily swayed by praise, and quick to adopt their positions, even at the expense of America’s national interests. And then there’s Trump’s personality: He is deeply fascinated with violence, retribution and other antisocial behavior.
Authoritarian leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin see Trump as malleable — easily swayed by praise, and quick to adopt their positions, even at the expense of America’s national interests. And then there’s Trump’s personality: He is deeply fascinated with violence, retribution and other anti-social behavior. As David Graham wrote in a searing essay for The Atlantic, “Violent language is the mother tongue of this Trump administration.”
Last Friday, Trump put his Hobbesian view of society into action when he signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense. It will now be called the Department of War, reverting to its pre-1949 name.
“We won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before that and in between,” he said, announcing the change, “and then we decided to go woke and changed the name to DOD. So, we’re going Department of War… And we were very strong, but we never fought to win. We just didn’t fight to win…I think the Department of War sends a signal…[It is a] much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth endorsed the rebrand enthusiastically. Standing beside Trump in the Oval Office, he declared, “We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct… We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So this war department, Mr. President — just like America — is back.”
Hegseth appears to be in his glory. He is now calling himself the “Secretary of War.”
Conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot described Trump’s move as the “perfect encapsulation of how he employs the military. It’s gimmicky and newsworthy, it prioritizes style over substance — and pushes the legal limits of presidential power.” After all, Congress is vested with the power to create or terminate government departments. But that, for Trump and MAGA Republicans, is just another inconvenient fact. In the end, the president will get his War Department.
By invoking “wokeness” to explain his decision, Trump (and Hegseth) revealed the paranoia and lies that undergird the larger MAGA and White right political project, where anyone who is not white, male-identifying or heterosexual is deemed inherently unfit for power, leadership or national belonging. Like political correctness, “wokeness” to Trump and his allies and messengers is a dehumanizing shorthand that means less-than, inferior, incompetent and weak as compared to “real Americans,” or more specifically “real men,” who are invariably white, straight and Christian.
As America’s first White president and champion of this White Restoration Project, Trump has systematically targeted senior military and civilian leaders who are Black or members of other racial minority groups, and women. Troops who are LGBTQ are facing an increasingly hostile environment. This is particularly true for transgender service members who are being forced out of the military and denied their retirement benefits. As Linda Robinson at the Council on Foreign Relations warned, this “crusade…is doing incalculable harm to government and public service.”
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Black and female officers have been “deemed insufficiently loyal to the President,” observed Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, in a February press release. “Removing the JAGs – the military’s lawyers – should cause deep bipartisan concern about the administration’s motives. This President is more concerned with driving division than ensuring national security and that the qualified rise in rank. The endgame here is sinister. For years, Trump has said he wants an officer corps loyal to him, including going so far as to say he wanted the kinds of generals Hitler had. These latest purges should not surprise us, but they should produce national and bipartisan outrage.”
There’s an old saying — often attributed to former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell — that the military is one of the few places in America where Black and brown people can order white men around. That’s the social order Trumpism and MAGA are moving very quickly to end.
Since Trump’s inauguration in January, the Defense Department has purged articles, images and footage on government websites about the contributions of African-Americans and other non-whites. The military achievements of women, members of the LGBTQ community and other marginalized groups have also been censored. Ships, bases and other facilities to honor trailblazing members of the military have also been changed. Hegseth has banned observances of Black History Month and Women’s History Month, calling such commemorations “divisive.” He has dismantled career development programs for underrepresented groups.
During a February briefing at the Pentagon, Hegseth summarized his approach. “I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength,’” he said. “We will treat everyone with fairness.”
In both 2016 and 2024, Trump won the White House in no small part because of strong support from “working-class” white men in rural America and the Rust Belt. This same cohort experienced a disproportionate percentage of military casualties during America’s post-9/11 forever wars in the Middle East and other parts of the world.
The president’s militarism and increasingly belligerent foreign policy, as symbolized by his War Department, is a betrayal of these voters. It’s also, as the Atlantic’s Tom Nichols pointed out on X, “an insult to the thousands who died in Korea and Vietnam and the other conflicts we were too ‘wokey’ to win. But then, can’t expect any better from a man who thinks American war dead are ‘suckers’ and ‘losers.’”
As Trump recreates his Department of War, white working-class and working-poor Trump voters and their families should read Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler’s short book “War is a Racket.” Written by the two-time Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Corps legend in 1935, his words remain hauntingly relevant nearly a century later: “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.”
Butler’s words remain true today. Rich, old, (white) men don’t fight these wars. Historically, it has fallen to young, poor and working-class people on both sides of the color line to make that sacrifice. Today, as Trump tries to implement a new world order, it’s still an inconvenient fact.
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