While the first half of the week contained some promising legal news, there have been several unsettling developments as the week progressed.

On Friday, Trump signed an executive order entitled “Restoring the United States Department of War”. We’d had a Department of War from 1789 through 1947, at which point it was renamed the Department of the Army; then in 1949 the Departments of Army, Navy, and Air Force were in effect combined into the modern Department of Defense. It would apparently take a statute to formally rename the Department of Defense, but Trump’s order authorizes the use of the terms Department of War and Secretary of War (for Hegseth) in “official correspondence, public communications, ceremonial contexts, and non-statutory documents within the executive branch.”

Earlier in the week, U.S. military forces carried out an air strike on a boat in the Caribbean, ostensibly because the boat was involved in drug trafficking by the Venezuelan “terrorist organization” Tren de Aragua. The legality of this strike is doubtful, although the President’s formal letter to Congress about the strike suggested the strike was justifiable on grounds of national self-defense, even though the 11 people killed in the attack would appear to be civilians rather than soldiers. Some are wondering if Trump is setting the stage for a war against Venezuela, perhaps in Wag The Dog fashion to distract from other woes.

Then yesterday, Trump made a social media post with an AI-generated picture that is beyond belief. The background is Chicago, burning and with helicopters flying over it; the caption reads “Chipocalypse Now”, in the font associated with the 1979 war movie Apocalypse Now; and the picture shows Trump’s face superimposed over the body & clothes of the officer played by Robert Duvall in that film. The text in the social media post reads: ” ‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” I have no words.