Wokey-dokey

I had to be reminded or in part informed (by Heather Cox Richardson) of a number of the cultural references in this "Truth" post: Trump's costume is that of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, played by Robert Duvall, the character who says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and who leads a helicopter raid over the Vietnamese countryside to the sound of the prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (representing the flight through the skies of Wotan's warrior daughters, dashing over battlefields on their airborne horses, to gather the bodies of dead heroes for the afterlife in the Hall of Battles, Wallhall), evoked in the picture by the helicopters over the Chicago skyline; while the three helicopter emojis in the message are apparently used by a certain type of rightwinger to register approval of the Chilean dictatorship  of General Augusto Pinochet and its habit of dealing with dissidents by tossing them, from flying helicopters, into the sea. I don't know why it seems to have been shot somewhere miles away on Lake Michigan, from a boat that's violently on fire, leaving Trump-Kilgore in the position of the cartoon dog saying, "This is fine" when it clearly isn't.  

Dr. Google tells me that "Chipocalypse Now" is the title of an episode from the Disney animated series "Big City Greens", named not for Chicago but for the show's villain, Chip Whistler, a wicked capitalist who hopes to demolish the protagonists' apartment building and replace it with a giant supermarket, but I believe that's just a coincidence.

I'm reasonably confident I understand Trump's motive for changing the name of the department from Defense to War, as from a trope he might have inherited from his cranky rightwing father about the general decadence of the armed forces after they "lost" China, and subsequently North Korea and South Vietnam, to the Communists. Trump referred to it pretty explicitly (if confusingly, in his slippery "weave" style) when he was signing the executive order:

“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.”

"Woke" meaning, I think, in this case, the adoption in 1947-49 of civilians at the top of the chain of command through the president and secretary of defense, a subject of serious resentment to rightwing generals from Douglas MacArthur to Curtis LeMay; and at the same time the 1949 Geneva Conventions for the wartime treatment of civilians, prisoners, and military personnel. Trump isn't at all opposed to war, as is sometimes claimed, at least if there's a potential for profit (as he always says of Iraq, "We should have kept the oil"); he just thinks—like MacArthur and LeMay—that it takes some war crimes to bring it to a successful conclusion in a reasonable time frame:

He added: “We could have won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct, or wokey, and we just fight forever.”

And there's something of a point in that, but to me it's the point that a war is a failure of policy, and it's best not to have one at all, as I often say, and I'm not the only one who says so—

From Princeton Professor of Politics and International Affairs, @jshapiro.bsky.social.

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— Alan Jagolinzer (@jagolinzer.bsky.social) September 7, 2025 at 3:58 PM

Unless it's truly forced on your country as a matter of self-defense—Putin's policy failure, not the Ukrainians', for instance, or Bush-Cheney's failure, not that of the Afghans or Iraqis. The title of secretary of defense as opposed to secretary of war, and the name of the department the secretary runs (merging the older departments of the Army and Navy and various intelligence offices) are supposed to memorialize that, and serve as a warning; defend us, but don't choose war if there's an alternative.

But to Trump it's an annoyance: he'd rather go with the war crimes and a secretary of war (though I notice he's avoiding general and ex-generals in this go-round—they don't make 'em like MacArthur any more, and the newer generation of generals keeps refusing to commit war crimes). The gratuitous blowing up last week of a Venezuelan speedboat with its 11 passengers and crew and the declassification and publicizing of the Navy's video of the attack seems like an announcement to the effect that war and war crime instead of defense is indeed now the US norm (I should note that according to reporting in El País the boat really was transporting narcotics, from the fishing village of San Juan de Unare to the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, but that doesn't make the incident any the less murder). There are also eight US warships in the Caribbean at the moment, and 4,600 Marines in Puerto Rico this week, training in amphibious landings, and the prospect of a criminally mismanaged assault on Venezuela looks more and more like the plan, which could be a pretty bad thing.

As to the war on Chicago, I'm not convinced there's any plan to bomb that, or dump dissidents into the lake from helicopters either, at least not yet; if they invade Chicago at all, and Trump seems possibly to be walking that back, frightened perhaps by Governor Pritzker's ferocious response and the enormous demonstrations on Saturday and the booing at the tennis match in Queens; it's more likely to follow the model of Los Angeles and DC, with masked ICE agents making lots of arrests of people who "look like" they might not be citizens (they're totally abandoning the story that they're looking for immigrant criminals, mark my words) and the Guard troops not doing much of anything other than scaring people with their guns—it'll be nice for Chicago, and good for the troops' mental health, if they get to help out in the parks with groundskeeping, but that might be too "wokey" for the White House. It'll be bad enough, especially in immigrant communities, and illegal as in Los Angeles, and the "smell of deportations in the morning" will be a big part of it, as opposed to the stopping of violent crime, which neither ICE nor the Guard have any idea how to do, though FBI and ATF and DEA agents may, as in DC, be there too. The purpose was never going to be fighting violent crime, just establishing their right to be there, as occupation troops, and getting the population used to it.

The purpose of the meme wasn't to make an announcement, and probably wasn't even Trump's idea; some bright spark like Trump's old caddy Dan Scavino, now White House deputy chief of staff, and looking to a new gig as director of the presidential personnel office (Johnny McEntee's old job), made it up to please the boss, making him look very strong and active and not like those wusses who think it should be the Department of Defense. Those people watch Apocalypse Now in a completely different way from the way you and I do: to them Kilgore is a favorite, playing his Wagner and owning the libs in the audience, and they laugh their heads off through that scene. My guess is Trump loved it and had it sent out from his "Truth" account without thinking that it might have any consequences other than making a few annoying people mad.