President Donald Trump loves playing to a crowd. And his new branding as a wartime president is designed to do just that.
The new Trump Doctrine is maximum force with maximum publicity against the easiest targets possible. After blowing up an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean—Secretary of State Marco Rubio made a point of emphasizing that they chose to execute rather than arrest the crew—the administration renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War. Trump himself threatened that Chicago would "find out why" the name was changed in a social media post promising "deportations" and casting himself as a villain from Apocalypse Now.
As Reason's Christian Britschghi points out, "Trump and his communications staff keep depicting the president as the bad guy doing bad things" because they like "the theater of armed, uniformed men marching around looking intimidating. They want the public to see the federal government as threatening and capable of exercising force at a moment's notice." Watch out: Here comes President Badass.
