A West Point alumni event honoring Tom Hanks was scrapped on the day President Donald Trump officially changed the name of the Department of Defense back to the Department of War.
Trump explained Friday that he instituted the rebrand because the Pentagon got ‘very politically correct or wokey’ and the U.S. was not winning wars.
That day, a West Point alumni group announced the cancelation of an awards ceremony that was meant to have taken place September 25 to garland Hanks, who is a veterans advocate but never served in the the military himself.
The prize he would have gotten was the Sylvanus Thayer Award, which the West Point Association of Graduates gives to non-alumni who ‘draw wholesome comparison’ to the military academy’s motto: ‘Duty, Honor, Country.’
Retired Army Col. Mark Bieger, the president and CEO of the organization, announced in an email to members that they were scuttling their tribute to Hanks – who was recently slammed on social media for portraying a Trump supporter as a dimwitted racist on Saturday Night Live.
‘This decision allows the Academy to continue its focus on its core mission of preparing cadets to lead, fight, and win as officers in the world’s most lethal force, the United States Army,’ he wrote, according to the Washington Post.
The president signed an executive order – his 200th – making the rebrand official on Friday afternoon, flanked by Pete Hegseth, now called the War Secretary, and the Chairman of Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan ‘Razin’ Caine.
The name change had been floated for weeks.
‘It has to do with winning,’ Trump explained. ‘We should have won every war. We could have won every war. But we really chose to be very politically correct or wokey and we just fight forever.’
‘We just fight to sort of tie,’ the commander-in-chief continued. ‘We never wanted to win wars. Every one of them we could have won easily with just a couple of little changes.’
‘We just didn’t fight to win. We didn’t lose anything, but we didn’t fight to win,’ the president added.
The original War Department name lasted from 1789 to 1947, with President Harry S. Truman changing the name in the aftermath of World War II when he merged the Navy, Air Force and War Departments.
‘And you know we had it,’ he said of the name. ‘And we won World War I, we won World War II, we won everything before and as I said, we won everything in between.’
As Trump was making the announcement, the department’s social media pages changed – at one point with the Pentagon’s X account calling it both the Department of War and the Department of Defense.
The president was asked why bring back ‘war’ when he was publicly seeking a Nobel Peace Prize.
‘Well I think I’ve gotten peace because of the fact that we’re strong,’ the president answered.
Trump ran in 2024 on erasing ‘wokeness’ in the military.
He’s done that in some ways by changing naming conventions.
In December 2020, Trump vetoed a defense spending bill because it included provisions to change all the names of U.S. bases that were named after Confederate generals.
The renaming process took place during President Joe Biden’s four years in office, but once Trump returned he immediately tried to get the names changed back.
The base was originally named Fort Bragg in 1918 after Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg.
That Bragg was a slaveowner – but he was also so inept that he helped the Confederacy lose the Civil War to U.S. forces.
In a Pentagon release in February, Fort Bragg will now be named after Roland L. Bragg.
A Pentagon spokesperson described Bragg as a World War II fighter ‘who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge.’
