Donald Trump on Wednesday raised eyebrows with a controversial suggestion to rename the secretary of defense position as secretary of war, a U.S. government title that hasn’t existed since the late 1940s.
Speaking at a NATO meeting in The Netherlands, Trump introduced Secretary of State Marco Rubio and former Fox News personality-turned-Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth by saying:
“Secretary of state and secretary of war. Shall we say secretary… It used to be called secretary of war. Maybe for a couple of weeks we’ll call it that because we feel like warriors.”
He continued:
“It used to be called secretary of war, in fact if you look at the old building next to the White House, you can see where it used to be secretary of war. Then we became politically correct and they called it secretary of defense. I don’t know, maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it but we feel that way.”
