Tom Nichols

Donald Trump is a showman who likes flashy spectacles and heated controversies. He has chosen Cabinet nominees for their shock value, attacked famous American universities, mobilized the Justice Department against his political enemies, and sent troops into American cities, fully aware of how much these theatrics would enrage his opponents.
But even in a term marked by political performance art, Trump’s plan to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War might be a new high—or low.

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A man with the power to destroy the entire world announces that no one and nothing can restrain him. “I can do whatever I want,” he says. Raised without love, he has become both omnipotent and neurotic. Unfortunately, his inner circle is a group of hapless subordinates who are scared to death of him.

Donald Trump loves to speak extemporaneously, and usually, he makes very little sense. (Sharks? The Unabomber? What?) Trying to turn his ramblings into a coherent message is like trying, as an old European saying goes, to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. But he is the president of the United States and holds the codes to some 2,000 nuclear weapons. When he speaks, his statements are both policy and a peek into the worldview currently governing the planet’s sole superpower.

The fallout from Donald Trump’s summit in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week continues to grow. On Friday, Trump flew to an apparently impromptu meeting with Putin, shaming America by greeting like an honored guest the man who’d ignited the largest war in Europe since Hitler.

Donald Trump wants to spend billions of dollars on a successor to President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, and he’s calling it “Golden Dome,” inspired by both Israel’s Iron Dome defense and Reagan’s early-1980s concept of a “peace shield” over North America. It’s a hugely ambitious project, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth apparently would prefer that no one talk about it.

Donald Trump, beset by a week of bad news, has decided to rattle the most dangerous saber of all. In a post today on his Truth Social site, the president claimed that in response to recent remarks by former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, he has “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.” (All American submarines are nuclear-powered; Trump may mean submarines armed with ballistic nuclear weapons.

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Updated at 7.44 p.m. ET
President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be on a mission to erase women from the top ranks of the U.S. armed forces.

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Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Joe Biden, among others, reportedly could sling Anglo-Saxonisms with gusto. In public, most of them managed to convey an image of geniality.

This story was updated on July 11, 2025, at 4:35 pm ET.
Working in government, especially in national defense or the intelligence community, can be an unsettling business. You must give up a few of your rights and a lot of your privacy in order to remain a trustworthy public servant.

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If you’re old enough, you’ve seen this movie: An eccentric billionaire, full of bile and nursing grudges against the incumbent Republican president, wants to create a third major political party and shake up the system.
In 1992, the billionaire was H.

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Remember when the United States engaged in an act of war against a country of some 90 million people by sending its B-2 bombers into battle? No? Well, you can be forgiven for letting it slip your mind; after all, it was more than two weeks ago.

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Oops, he did it again.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump had a rambling conversation with the Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo.

President Donald Trump has done what he swore he would not do: involve the United States in a war in the Middle East. His supporters will tie themselves in knots (as Vice President J. D. Vance did last week) trying to jam the square peg of Trump’s promises into the round hole of his actions. And many of them may avoid calling this “war” at all, even though that’s what Trump himself called it tonight.

At the end of the classic 1972 film The Godfather, the new don of the family, Michael Corleone, attends a baptism while his men wipe out the heads of the other New York mafia families—all of them Michael’s enemies, and all intending one day to do him harm. Rather than wait for their eventual attacks, Michael dispatched them himself. “Today, I settled all family business,” Michael says to his traitorous brother-in-law, before having him killed.

President Donald Trump continued his war against America’s most cherished military traditions today when he delivered a speech at Fort Bragg. It is too much to call it a “speech”; it was, instead, a ramble, full of grievance and anger, just like his many political-rally performances. He took the stage to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”—which has become a MAGA anthem—and then pointed to the “fake news,” encouraging military personnel to jeer at the press.

President Donald Trump is about to launch yet another assault on democracy, the Constitution, and American traditions of civil-military relations, this time in Los Angeles. Under a dubious legal rationale, he is activating 2,000 members of the National Guard to confront protests against actions by ICE, the immigration police who have used thuggish tactics against citizens and foreigners alike in the United States.  
By militarizing the situation in L.A.

Today’s phone call between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump was a painful reminder that Trump is the junior partner in the Russian-American relationship and that Putin will continue his mass-murder campaign in Ukraine for as long as he can get away with it. Nothing else of substance emerged from the call. When it comes to Europe’s largest armed conflict since World War II, Putin’s still in charge.

Esteemed Comrades of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs! Today we ask you to review your files for any communications you may have had with unreliable elements who are critical of our Party and our leader. If you have had contact with journalists, researchers, or other subversives, we ask you to report these interactions in full to the senior comrades responsible for the important work of ideological vigilance.

Donald Trump said on the campaign trail that he would make peace between Ukraine and Russia in a day. Three months later, he’s behind schedule, and his plan now is to end the fighting quickly by selling out Ukraine and its people to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The proposal that Trump, Vice President J. D. Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are pushing is not a framework for peace, but a rich and bloody reward to Moscow for three years of aggression and war crimes.

The United States grabbing land from an ally sounds like the stuff of a Netflix political thriller. But every American should contemplate three realities about Donald Trump’s aggressive desire to acquire Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory. First, unlike his usual shtick, in which he floats wild ideas and then he and his aides alternate between saying he was serious and saying he might have been joking, he means it. The Danes seem to believe him, and so should Americans.

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For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.
The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday.

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The defense of the United States is a serious business. Breaches of national security are especially dangerous.

I loved the 1980s, when I was a college student, and I especially loved the music. Lately, I’ve been thinking of a classic ’80s anti-war song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, a British new-wave band, whose lyrics were an angry ode to the airplane that dropped the first nuclear weapon on Japan:
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t ever have to end this way
Enola Gay
It shouldn’t fade in our dreams away
The Enola Gay was named for the mother of its pilot, Colonel Paul Tibbets.

American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic.

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy.

President Trump tonight began a purge of the senior ranks of the United States armed forces in an apparent effort to intimidate the military and create an officer corps personally loyal to him. The president fired General C.Q. Brown, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a remarkable move but also one that Trump and his MAGA allies signaled was coming.

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This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death.

Like many Americans lately, I am seized with curiosity about who is actually running the government of the United States. For that reason, I watched Sean Hannity’s Fox News interview tonight with President Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
But I am still not sure who’s in charge. If there is a headline from the interview, it is that the president of the United States feels that he requires the services of a multi-billionaire to enforce his executive orders.

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Senator Katie Britt, Republican of Alabama, is upset.

Dear Mr. Secretary,
Tradition dictates that I begin by congratulating you on your confirmation. You seem like a man who appreciates frankness, and so I will spare you empty decorum: It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have been opposed to your nomination to lead the Department of Defense from the moment it was announced. But the Senate has voted, and you are now the leader of the most powerful military on the planet.