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As he signed an order recognizing the Defense Department as the “Department of War,” President Trump said that the country “could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct.”
Sept. 5, 2025, 8:36 p.m. ET
President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that ceremonially recognized the Defense Department as the “Department of War,” a name that was dropped after World War II and that the president claimed had caused the country to enter wars it “never fought to win.”
“We won World War II. We won everything before, and as I said, we won everything in between,” Mr. Trump said at an event in the Oval Office, where he signed the order. “And we were very strong, but we never fought to win. We just didn’t fight to win.”
Mr. Trump argued that the name, which was changed by President Harry S. Truman to combine all of branches of the military, had been changed because the country “decided to go woke.”
“I think the Department of War sends a signal,” Mr. Trump said. The change, he argued, was a “much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.”
He added: “We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct, or wokey, and we just fight forever.”
The Department of War was established by Congress under President George Washington in 1789, just months after the Constitution was ratified. Mr. Truman changed the agency’s name as part of the National Security Act he signed into law in 1947, which merged the Navy and War departments and a newly independent Air Force into a single organization. Congress established the Department of Defense name in 1949.
