Trump faces criticism over to order to rebrand Pentagon as ‘Department of War’
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics where opponents have criticised Donald Trump’s expected move to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “department of war”.
The president is expected to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the rebrand, the White House said, as part of an attempt to formalize the name change without an act of Congress.
The order will designate “department of war” as a “secondary title”, an administration official said, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.
But the order will instruct the rest of the executive branch to use the “department of war” name in internal and external communications, and allows the defense secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials to use “secretary of war” as official titles.
Trump and Hegseth have been publicly pushing for the rebrand for weeks, claiming the change would present the US military as more aggressive to the world by reverting to the name that was used when the US was victorious in the first and second world wars.
“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was the Department of War,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
The move could cost tens of millions of dollars, with letterheads and signs on buildings in the US and at bases worldwide possibly needing to be changed.
But there has been criticism over the move. Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth – a war veteran who lost both her legs serving in Afghanistan and who is now a member of the armed services committee – said:
Why not put this money toward supporting military families or toward employing diplomats that help prevent conflicts from starting in the first place?
Because Trump would rather use our military to score political points than to strengthen our national security and support our brave servicemembers and their families – that’s why
Stay with us for the latest on this story:
In other developments:
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The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.
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Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.
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Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.
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Donald Trump said Thursday that he thinks Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to become New York City’s next mayor unless two of the three major candidates running against him drop out of the race. But the Republican didn’t say which two candidates he’d like to see quit.
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Demolition to build president Trump’s new ballroom off the East Wing of the White House can begin without approval of the commission tasked with vetting construction of federal buildings, the Trump-appointed head of the panel said Thursday.
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As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.
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The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.
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New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
Key events
Hundreds of workers detained in major Ice raid at US Hyundai factory
Hundreds of workers at a factory being built in Georgia to make car batteries for Hyundai and Kia electric vehicles were detained in a massive raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on Thursday that stopped construction.
The facility is part of what would be the biggest industrial investment in the state’s history and had been hailed as a huge boost for the economy by Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.
At least 450 people were arrested, according to the Atlanta office of the US justice department agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
However the Korea Economic Daily later reported around 560 workers at the Hyundai facility and LG Energy Solution (LGES), had been detained, citing unidentified industry sources. Some 300 are South Korean nationals, according to local media reports. Hyundai Motor is a South Korean automotive company but has many international plants.
The raid on Thursday has dealt a setback to the company’s substantial project in Georgia and was a dramatic iteration of the Trump administration’s harsh crackdown on immigrants in the US.
It also showed the disruptive impact that Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda is having on businesses, even as the White House tries to spur more inflows from foreign investors.
A government official representing South Korea, the home of Hyundai Motor, said those arrested were being held at an Ice detention facility.
South Korea’s foreign ministry said that “many of our nationals” have been detained and expressed concern about the impact of the raid.
“The economic activities of our companies investing in the United States and the interests of our citizens must not be unduly violated during the course of US law enforcement,” ministry spokesperson Lee Jae-woong said in a statement on Friday.
Western troops in Ukraine would be ‘legitimate targets’, Putin says
Shaun Walker
Vladimir Putin has said any western troops placed in Ukraine would be “legitimate targets” for Russian strikes, upping the stakes for Kyiv as Donald Trump’s efforts to forge a peace deal show little sign that are any closer to success
Kyiv’s allies scramble to come up with a convincing offer of post-war support to Ukraine.
With little sign that , Putin on Friday said any guarantees that involved boots on the ground would violate Moscow’s long-standing objections to Nato troops in Ukraine.
The Russian leader knows that western countries are unwilling to go to war over Ukraine, and his threats on Friday look designed to further spook European capitals on the escalatory dangers of committing troops.
Trump has vacillated over what support the US might provide for such a mission. At a meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders the day before he met Putin in Alaska, he appeared to promise some kind of US involvement but many are still blurry on the details.
DOJ looking at ways to ban transgender Americans from owning guns – report
Trump’s justice department is considering proposals to limit the rights of transgender people to own guns, CNN reports, citing two officials familiar with the internal discussions.
According to CNN, the “preliminary” discussions stem from the recent deadly school shooting in Minneapolis that killed two children and injured 21 people, which police say was carried out by a transgender woman.
Republicans have long resisted gun control policies aimed at limiting possession among those suffering from mental health issues, but CNN reports that the DOJ discussions centre on a proposal to “declare that people who are transgender are mentally ill and can lose their second amendment rights to possess firearms”.
A reminder that it is well-known that the vast majority of mass shooters in the US are cisgender men, and LGBTQ+ individuals as perpetrators are very rare. They are more often the targets of violence.
It goes without saying that if the DOJ’s proposal goes ahead it would be highly controversial and certain to draw a swift legal challenge.
Trump expected to nominate Lt Gen William Hartman to lead NSA and Cyber Command – report
Donald Trump plans to nominate Lt Gen William Hartman, the acting leader of both the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command since April, to formally lead both agencies, Politico reported yesterday, citing two people with knowledge of the situation.
Trump to issue executive order to allow punishments for countries wrongfully detaining Americans – report
Donald Trump is expected to issue an executive order as early as Friday to establish a designation for state sponsors of wrongful detention, in a move that would allow the US to punish countries that illegally detain Americans or take them hostage, CBS News reports this morning.
According to the president’s schedule, Trump is due to sign executive orders later today at 2pm ET including, as we’ve been reporting, rebranding the Department of Defense as the “department of war”.
After Trump said earlier this week that he wanted two candidates to drop out of the New York City mayor’s race to create a one-on-one race against Zohran Mamdani, some of the president’s advisers have been trying to find a place for current mayor Eric Adams that would pull him out of his reelection campaign.
The New York Times reports that one option in the mix is nominating Adams as ambassador to Saudi Arabia, citing people familiar with the discussions.
It’s not clear if Trump is directly involved in these conversations, the Times writes. An ambassadorship also requires Senate confirmation, which could be difficult given Adams’ liabilities.
Steve Witkoff, a New York real estate investor and Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, “has actively pursued the matter in recent days, meeting personally with Mr Adams earlier this week in Florida and speaking with other people close to him,” the Times writes.
Chicago braces for Trump’s federal law enforcement deployment
Trump said this week he will be sending troops into Chicago, calling the Democrat-led city a “hellhole”. It would be the second US city to receive national guard troops after Trump declared a national crime emergency and deployed about 800 troops to Washington DC in August.
“We’re going in,” Trump said about Chicago. “I didn’t say when, [but] we’re going in.”
An advance team of at least 30 agents is currently undergoing crowd control and flash grenade training at Naval Station Great Lakes north of Chicago, and 230 agents, most of whom work for Customs and Border Protection, are being sent to Chicago from Los Angeles, sources told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Chicago leaders have pushed back on Trump’s views of the city. Chicago residents say the city’s immigrant communities are on edge. Illinois governor JB Pritzker has expressed concern that Ice agents will target Mexican Independence Day events this month, and a large festival planned for the day this weekend was postponed.
But there is a long history of organized resistance that will stand up to the Trump administration. “If you think of the civic action you’ve seen over history, whether that’s the Pullman strikes a century ago, or Haymarket, or the early union movement, or what we did in the civil rights movement, or the organizing for the Women’s March, Chicagoans are organized. So we aren’t helpless,” said Edwin Eisendrath, a former member of the Chicago city council.
As Trump readies to send federal agents into more cities run by Democrats, the takeover of the nation’s capital continues.
But, the Washington Post reports, Congress is not expected to vote to extend the Trump administration’s takeover of the DC police department. The temporary takeover is set to expire next week and would need a vote of Congress to continue.
The Post says that DC mayor Muriel Bowser’s cooperative tone “mollified” the White House. DC separately has sued to stop the National Guard deployment after a federal judge in California ruled that sending troops to Los Angeles was illegal. California Gov. Gavin Newsom also said the deployment there cost taxpayers nearly $120m, an example of “waste, fraud and abuse”.
Stephen Miller, Trump’s adviser, has led the DC operation, the Post reports in a separate piece, saying that the DC takeover was a signature piece of Trump’s domestic policy agenda and Miller is expected to be “involved for a long time”.
Trump’s legal woes mount as supreme court to rule on trade tariffs
Lucy Campbell
This week’s dramatic court ruling that Donald Trump’s sweeping trade tariffs, which he has used to upend global trade, were in fact illegal is the latest in a series of losses for the president’s radical agenda that are ultimately heading for a final showdown in the US supreme court.
Trump has already asked the supreme court to overturn the lower court ruling in the tariffs case. Almost certain to follow are Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans, his hostile conflict with Harvard University and his deployment of the national guard and marines to Los Angeles. All have been deemed unlawful in lower courts.
“It’s simple: the president and his administration continue to do illegal things at an astonishing pace, and so the courts are finding that these things are illegal,” said Donald Sherman, executive director and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
“The president is committed to pursuing his agenda regardless of whether it’s legal or not, and is seeing what he can get away with.”
The ultimate arbiter of that will be the supreme court, which is stacked 6-3 in favor of conservatives, many of whom Trump has appointed. The court has already dramatically limited the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions to pause Trump administration policies across the country.
Robert Tait
Washington DC on Thursday sued to stop Donald Trump’s deployment of national guard troops during the administration’s law enforcement intervention there.
The city’s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, said the hundreds of troops were essentially an “involuntary military occupation”. He argued in the federal lawsuit that the deployment was an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
A federal judge in California recently ruled that Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles after days of protests over immigration raids in June had been illegal. The Republican administration is appealing that decision and Trump has said he is ready to order federal intervention in Chicago and Baltimore, despite staunch opposition in those Democratic-led cities.
That ruling, however, does not directly apply to Washington, where the president has more control over the guard than in states.
About 2,300 troops from seven states have been deployed in the streets of the US capital since 11 August in a move that Schwalb says exceeds the president’s powers and violates the city’s autonomy, as enshrined in the Home Rule Act.
