President Donald Trump explained Friday that he was changing the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War because the Pentagon got too ‘wokey’ – and the U.S. wasn’t winning wars.
The president signed an executive order – his 200th – making the rebrand official on Friday afternoon, flanked by Pete Hegseth, now called the War Secretary, and the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan ‘Razin’ Caine.
The name change had been floated for weeks.
‘It has to do with winning,’ Trump explained. ‘We should have won every war. We could have won every war. But we really chose to be very politically correct or wokey and we just fight forever.’
‘We just fight to sort of tie,’ the commander-in-chief continued. ‘We never wanted to win wars. Every one of them we could have won easily with just a couple of little changes.’
‘We just didn’t fight to win. We didn’t lose anything, but we didn’t fight to win,’ the president added.
The original War Department name lasted from 1789 to 1947, with President Harry S. Truman changing the name in the aftermath of World War II when he merged the Navy, Air Force and War Departments.
‘And you know we had it,’ he said of the name. ‘And we won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before and as I said, we won everything in between.’
President Donald Trump explained Friday that he was changing the name of the Department of the Defense to the Department of War because the Pentagon got too ‘wokey’ – and the U.S. wasn’t winning wars
As Trump made the announcement, the department’s social media pages changed, at one point with the Pentagon’s X account calling it both the Department of War and the Department of Defense
As Trump was making the announcement, the department’s social media pages changed – at one point with the Pentagon’s X account calling it both the Department of War and the Department of Defense.
The president was asked why bring back ‘war’ when he was publicly seeking a Nobel Peace Prize.
‘Well I think I’ve gotten peace because of the fact that we’re strong,’ the president answered.
Trump ran in 2024 on erasing ‘wokeness’ in the military.
He’s done that in some ways by changing naming conventions.
In December 2020, Trump vetoed a defense spending bill because it included provisions to change all the names of U.S. bases that were named after Confederate generals.
The renaming process took place during President Joe Biden’s four years in office, but once Trump returned he immediately tried to get the names changed back.
Hegseth announced just weeks into the administration that he Fort Liberty, a large base in eastern North Carolina, would revert back to Fort Bragg.
The Department of Defense, which is headquartered in the Pentagon (pictured) will be renamed the Department of War, with President Donald Trump signing an executive order on the matter on Friday
The base was originally named Fort Bragg in 1918 after Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.
That Bragg was a slaveowner – but he was also so inept that he helped the Confederacy lose the Civil War to U.S. forces.
In a Pentagon release in February, Fort Bragg will now be named after Roland L. Bragg.
A Pentagon spokesperson described Bragg as a World War II fighter ‘who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge.’
