Trump’s department of war rebrand ‘won’t strengthen national security or help military personnel’ – US politics live

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Meanwhile, Trump has grown increasingly pessimistic about the chance of brokering an end to the Russia-Ukraine conflict anytime soon or seeing the leaders of the two countries meet in person, NBC News reported on Friday, citing two senior administration officials.

Reuters could not immediately confirm the report.

It comes as Trump posted this morning on Truth Social that Russia had been “lost” to China. He wrote:

Looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest, China. May they have a long and prosperous future together! President Donald J. Trump

President Donald Trump’s deal-making approach to diplomacy is “quite cynical”, but in a positive sense, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview published on Friday.

In an interview with Russian news outlet Argumenty i Fakty, Peskov contrasted Trump’s position with that of European countries which, he said, were doing everything they could to hinder a peaceful settlement of the war in Ukraine.

“In contrast, Trump is much more constructive. He is, in the good sense of the word, quite cynical. In terms of ‘why fight if you can trade’. And based on these interests of America, he does everything to stop wars,” Peskov said.

He added that Russia would prefer to resolve the Ukraine conflict diplomatically rather than militarily. “And if Trump can help us in making these political and diplomatic means available, then our interests coincide here, and this can and should be welcomed.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump could meet again in the near future, Peskov added.

Trump faces criticism over to order to rebrand Pentagon as ‘Department of War’

Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics where opponents have criticised Donald Trump’s expected move to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War.

The president is expected to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the rebrand, the White House said, as part of an attempt to formalize the name change without an act of Congress.

The order will designate “department of war” as a “secondary title”, an administration official said, as a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency.

But the order will instruct the rest of the executive branch to use the “department of war” name in internal and external communications, and allows the defense secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials to use “secretary of war” as official titles.

Trump and Hegseth have been publicly pushing for the rebrand for weeks, claiming the change would present the US military as more aggressive to the world by reverting to the name that was used when the US was victorious in the first and second world wars.

“Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was the Department of War,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week. “Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”

The move could cost tens of millions of dollars, with letterheads and signs on buildings in the US and at bases worldwide possibly needing to be changed.

But there has been criticism over the move. Democratic senator Tammy Duckworth – a war veteran who lost both her legs serving in Afghanistan and who is now a member of the armed services committee – said:

Why not put this money toward supporting military families or toward employing diplomats that help prevent conflicts from starting in the first place?

Because Trump would rather use our military to score political points than to strengthen our national security and support our brave servicemembers and their families - that’s why

Stay with us for the latest on this story:

In other developments:

• The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.

• Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.

• Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.

• Donald Trump said Thursday that he thinks Democrat Zohran Mamdani is likely to become New York City’s next mayor unless two of the three major candidates running against him drop out of the race. But the Republican didn’t say which two candidates he’d like to see quit.

• Demolition to build president Trump’s new ballroom off the East Wing of the White House can begin without approval of the commission tasked with vetting construction of federal buildings, the Trump-appointed head of the panel said Thursday.

• As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.

• The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.

• New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.