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.

Some Republican senators, it seems, have begun to fret that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not being entirely honest when he sought their votes to confirm him as secretary of Health and Human Services. Back in January, Kennedy reassured lawmaker after lawmaker that he would not limit access to vaccines. But today, before the Senate Finance Committee, he aggressively defended anti-vaccine talking points, alarming Democrats and Republicans alike.

Sorry. We decided there were too many children.
You know how it goes.
Their hands are too small. Sometimes they are sticky, and no one knows why. They say they’re eating their dinner, but you can see that they are just pushing it around on their plate. They come up to you on the sidewalk and tell you their whole life story for 10 minutes, wearing face paint from a birthday party three days ago. Some afternoons they announce that they are sharks, but they are obviously not sharks.

Jack Vincent Picone / Fairfax Media / Getty
Delphine Anderson bids farewell to her 6-year-old son Alexis on the first day of school in Australia on February 1, 1989.Andrew Craft / USA Today Network / Reuters
Members of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity cheer on students as they arrive for the first day of school at Margaret Willis Elementary School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Monday, August 25, 2025.Ronald W.

Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter’s YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for life,” they say, the camera focused on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for death.

The black-and-white video President Donald Trump released yesterday was, in some respects, familiar. The grainy clip, only 30 seconds long and taken from a U.S. aircraft, shows a small boat skipping across the waves, bracketed by crosshairs. The crosshairs move in closer. Seconds later, a missile explodes, engulfing the boat in fire and destroying everything and everyone on board.

This spring, months before the recent dramatic departures from the CDC, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. battled with the agency’s scientists during the very first public-health crisis of his tenure as health secretary. As measles tore through a remote community in West Texas, Kennedy waffled on the vaccine and promoted alternative remedies, such as vitamin A. So the CDC pushed back.