Last week, the Department of Defense renamed itself the Department of War. Never mind that the department’s name is prescribed by Congress and can’t actually be changed by presidential fiat. The Trump administration and its allies made a big show of renaming the department anyway, with a social media blitz emphasizing WAR in capital letters and a speech from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in which he recited slam poetry about how he wanted “maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”
The administration clarified that the department’s legal name was still Defense (they’re seeking congressional approval for the name change). Until then, War is being used as a “secondary title,” making this pointless exercise the MAGA equivalent of changing your pronouns. It’s the latest absurdity to come out of the Trump administration, and hardly the most consequential.
But it is part of a troubling trend. Today’s right-wing politics don’t revolve around results or competence, nor even an identifiable ideology. The central organizing principle of the Trumpian right—to the extent that there is an organizing principle other than “Do things that benefit Donald Trump personally”—is the performance of toughness and the pantomime of warrior culture.
Once you start looking for this performative toughness, it’s everywhere in the MAGA movement.
It starts at the top of the food chain. Trump has exclaimed about beating up protesters and has mused about shooting them. He makes a big deal of parading the military around—sometimes with actual parades, sometimes by having troops meander around American cities. Trump’s immigration enforcers love to make a big show of arresting immigrants with as much theatricality as possible, like when they put hundreds of South Koreans working to open a Hyundai plant in Georgia in chains last week and released a slick video promoting the raid.
Trump’s behaviors filter down to his subordinates. J.D. Vance, perhaps learning from his political benefactor, has adopted a tough-guy persona online. Vance now likes to post about how great it is to kill the “scum of the earth”, and he’s taken up showy cursing with all the believability of an 8-year-old trying out his first swear word on the playground. It’s remarkable for the defense secretary to tell the press that America’s military should pay less attention to what’s legal and more attention to just killing people when they’re told. But hey! He looked manly on camera saying it, and isn’t that what really matters?
These tough guy urges aren’t limited to senior government officials—they’re also endemic in the MAGA base. One of last week’s big discourses on Twitter revolved around how many thousands of people one would hypothetically kill to save a family member. And these behaviors aren’t just online bravado. Consider one aspiring ICE agent at a recent job fair:
Reports of rough tactics don’t bother Aaron Ely, either. A former bantamweight MMA fighter who went by the ring name “The Cyborg,” Ely settled on an IT career after his hip gave out. He limped into the hiring expo last week hoping ICE could use his computer expertise. He said he felt he was no longer able to advance in the private sector because the market is crowded with candidates from India willing to do the work for less.
“I keep seeing these memes where Indians are bragging about taking our tech jobs,” said Ely, 36. “So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement and send you home.’”
This, unfortunately, is the face of the modern right. There’s little to be found in any of these actions that promotes conservative ideas like strong families, respect for tradition, or limited government. That’s all been replaced with boasts about how many faces you can grind into the dirt, how quickly you’d jump to kill people—and how little you care about the consequences.
The saddest part is how none of this is real toughness. It’s all a show, a facade. J.D. Vance is not a swaggering macho man. It’s shocking to read some of his older posts (now deleted, of course) where he comes across as thoughtful, nuanced, a bit wonkish and dweeby, and contrast them with his current attempts to talk about how he “doesn’t give a shit” whether or not the U.S. is committing war crimes.
We all know that the National Guard isn’t solving murders in D.C.’s worst neighborhoods. They’re picking up trash and patrolling the mean streets around the Lincoln Memorial. We all know the ICE agents arresting South Koreans at a battery factory aren’t capturing violent criminals. We’ve all had to sit next to the fake tough guy eager to talk about fantasies of danger or revenge. But the guy who says he’d kill for his family is often the same guy who’s mysteriously absent when asked to do the laundry for his family, because serving the family isn’t the important part. The violence is.
And the ICE recruit above eager to slam faces into the pavement? A flailing, lost young man who can’t get a job and has apparently turned to blaming immigrants. That’s not a tough guy, it’s a small, sad man desperately play-acting at toughness. So much of the MAGA movement is weak men desperately grasping onto the might-makes-right morality of strongmen.
Donald Trump didn’t invent the right’s obsession with toughness. Conservative politicians have talked about military strength for generations, writing books and giving speeches about military acumen and strength. Right-wing media usually rewards braggadocio over substance. But Trump is the man who distilled this impulse into its purest form. His career in business and entertainment was built on playing the role of the domineering boss, the man who “fires” you with a scowl and a finger jab. In Trump’s case this was very literally a stage persona—the man famously avoided the draft by claiming to have bone spurs. Despite that, he’s managed to take his persona and turn the Republican Party away from “compassionate conservatism” towards the idea that compassion is weak and effeminate.
This matters because it makes politics pointless. Any actual attempts to promote good policy will be derailed by the need to do whatever’s toughest. Consider the raid on the Hyundai factory mentioned above. South Korea is one of America’s closest allies. It also has done exactly what the Trump administration has asked of it, increasing military spending and investing heavily in American manufacturing projects. And what was South Korea’s reward? To have its citizens paraded around in chains by the very administration who begged South Korea to invest more in America.
For an administration that supposedly wants to make things in America, the ICE raid in Georgia was an incomprehensibly stupid course of action. It will do catastrophic levels of damage to future international investment and hamper U.S. manufacturing. But that’s what happens under Trump, because the goal isn’t really to build things: It’s to look tough.