Two of Donald Trump ’s favorite pastimes ( giving things new names and doing stuff that annoys people who didn’t vote for him ) converged last week when the president signed an executive order renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War.” His unsurprising rationale for doing so? “It used to be called the Department of War and it had a stronger sound,” he explained to reporters while teasing the news in August. Under the old name, the president said, “We won World War I, we won World War II. We won everything before that and in between.” The signing was followed by a series of remarks from Secretary Pete Hegseth, who suggested it was because the Department of War became the Department of Defense in 1949 that the US failed to win the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and

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