What really happened to the German gold housed in the United States?

Last January, Glenn covered the story that the German Central Bank was planning to repatriate its gold reserves from the United States and France. Ultimately, it was agreed upon that Germany would only actually take a fraction of its holdings back. Why the sudden change of heart? Glenn opened Wednesday's Glenn Beck Program with a disturbing report about what really happened when the Germany Central Bank decided to repatriate its gold reserves.

Tonight, I want to start here, and this is probably something that we’re going to have to talk about several times because it’s really hard to understand. But we’ve talked about it once before over several months, but I think things have gotten significantly worse, and let me explain. Last January, Germany started asking if they could just come into the Federal Reserve and look at their stash of gold.

This is the gold that the Feds supposedly hold, and the Fed said no. Germany was like I’m sorry, what? Huh? Well, not surprisingly, Germany announced soon after that they wanted their gold back. Because they weren’t even allowed to see their gold, that got them a little nervous. They said we want to repatriate our gold from the Fed.

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Bundesbank to bring gold home, plans to hold 50% of gold reserves in Frankfurt by 2020, so 300 tons are going to leave New York, 374 tons from Paris. Well, not quite clear why.

It’s German politics.

Is that what it is?

They want to have it, right? They moved it out of Germany because of the Cold War, right, the threat the Russians would take it? It’s just the same reason most of the gold is sitting in the basement of the New York Fed. In World War II, Europeans moved their gold over here to avoid the war, and now they’re moving back.

What a bunch of bull crap. This is the biggest bunch of bull crap I’ve ever heard. Why does anybody watch these guys? I have no idea. The reason why they moved the gold over to the United States is because we said we would be the gold standard. Yes, they wanted to move the gold over here for security reasons, etc., etc., but we promised them that we would never go off the gold standard, and we didn’t until the 1970s.

Why do they want to move them over? Well, there’s something to tangible gold. Well, no, not if you believe in this. What’s the difference? But if you say hey, can I get into that bank and see my money, and the bank says no, huh uh, I don’t think so, don’t you say I want to take my money out of that bank, and I’m going to store it someplace else?

So the gold supposedly has been sitting in the vaults since the 1950s, and you know, it shouldn’t take any more than a little bit of Swiffering before you send it back. But the Fed said that it’s going to take until 2020 before they can return that gold, seven years. Now, why would it take seven years to dust something off and ship it out? I mean, we have FedEx. I know you’re not going to send FedEx, but we have cargo planes.

Now, that’s what they said last year. They were going to make their first payment on that over the holidays, and they did, but something happened along the way. Apparently we had to melt their gold bars down. The Fed claims that about 6,700 tons of gold from Germany is in their vaults. What Germany is asking to get back is 300 tons, 5% of their stack, shouldn’t be a problem.

It’s been a year since they requested, and the U.S. has just sent back 37.5 tons. That’s 50 tons short of what we need to send each year to meet Germany’s request by the deadline. We didn’t even hit the first payment. Okay, if I’m German, that makes me nervous. Wait a minute, you promised you’d send all of the first year, and you only sent half of it. What’s the problem here?

And here’s the disturbing part, even more disturbing. The reports that are coming out now is that the gold we sent them over the holidays was melted down and recast. This is important. It begs the question why? I can think of several reasons, but none of them really make sense, except the situation is worse than even I thought it was when I talked to you about rehypothecation.

I think there’s a good chance that there’s not a lot of that gold left. But how did that happen? I mean, do we have another Sandy Berger loose, you know, stashing gold bricks in his socks? No, the answer is partially rehypothecation. Now, this is something we talked about on this program before, if you remember.

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Glenn: It’s why when they’re taking the gold, and Germany says, I want the gold, return our gold, it’s ours, the Federal Reserve says, Okay, but we’ll return 10% in seven years. Well, how hard is it to return our gold? It’s got the German Republic stamped on it. Give us our gold. The reason why – this is my theory – the reason why they’re not returning that for seven years is because a little phone call came in, and they said to the Germans, hey, rehypothecation dude. If you take your gold, there’s not enough gold here.

We were playing a game. There’s only so many assets, and so we just keep building on those assets in a bogus way. So once people demand their hard asset back, the entire thing collapses, and that’s the last phase of what we’re headed for. Rehypothecation, learn it.

Okay, that’s really important. Let’s start at the basics. The Federal Reserve is a collection of banks. We don’t know whose banks they are. We’re not allowed to look at their books or anything else. They’re the ones that we put the gold in, and then they give us this instead. They print our money. But we’re not allowed to see…we just gave them all that gold? Yes, that unfortunately is the way it works. It sounds like a scam already, doesn’t it?

The money has to be backed by something. It needs to be backed by gold, so we put all of our gold into the Federal Reserve, just a giant bank, and they gave us a stack of cash. And then we said okay, this is the cash the Federal Reserve has. Remember, it’s all backed by gold. Then we convinced that the entire world, not just the U.S. but the rest of the West. Germany gave it to us, Japan, the UK. Everybody gave us their gold to hold like in a safety deposit box for the entire world, okay? Safety deposit box, let me stop there for a second.

I want you to think of the vaults down at the basement of the Federal Reserve in Manhattan as a safety deposit box. You go in. Say you have jewelry, I have my wedding ring. It’s my anniversary today. This is the ring we had made for me. It’s the Klimt, The Kiss on it, and it’s special to me. And if I go to a safety deposit box, I put it in there with all the other, you know, lovely plastic jewelry that I have, and I bring it to the bank. And I say I want to put this in a safety deposit box.

They give me a receipt. They give me a key. I go in, and I put it all into the safety deposit box. I see it the whole way. Anytime I can walk in and say I want to see my stuff in my safety deposit. Yes sir, Mr. Beck. Do you have your key? Yes, I do. We both unlock it. There we have it. We each have a key, and I can see it anytime.

Now, at some point if I go back and I say I want my wedding ring back, and I want all my jewelry, they say, oh, I can’t let you see that – wait a minute, what? What do you mean I can’t see that? And then if they give me not this ring, but they give me another wedding ring, might weigh exactly the same, but it’s not my wedding ring, wouldn’t you ask some questions?

Let me explain rehypothecation one time and then back to what happened to Germany. Why I said originally they weren’t going to give their money back to them for seven years is because rehypothecation is exactly what happened to our housing crisis, and it’s happening to our gold because everybody got greedy. Everybody was greedy in the housing market, not necessarily you but the banks.

Here’s what happened: Let’s say these were just houses. Jeremy here wanted to buy a house. I was a bank. I said okay, I’m going to need your house as collateral. You continue to pay for that, but I’m holding that collateral. But then me as the bank, I need a loan, so I go over here to Germany. And I say hey, Germany, I have this house over here. If you’ll just give me some money for this house, then we’ll be square, but if I don’t pay you, then you can take this house.

Well, wait a minute, I can’t really do that because then he becomes the owner of this house, but I’m the owner of this house as well. And then he says he needs some money, so he sells this same house to Japan and then to England. And we keep selling everything to each other over and over again. There’s no real asset. If he defaults and doesn’t pay me, I default. And because I default, he says I’m going to default, and he says give me the house.

Well, I’m sitting for the house. I need it from him. He needs it from me, but he needs it from him. And he needs it from him, and it goes back around. It doesn’t work. This is what’s happening with gold. I believe rehypothecation, the West wanted a fat and sassy lifestyle that none of us could afford, so the Federal Reserve and the central banks all around the world sold our gold over and over and over again.

We took our gold, and we said okay, we’ve already printed all that money for United States, what the heck, Japan, how much do you need? We’re going to take, and you’re going to make a loan on this gold for Japan. And then Japan said okay, Germany needs some money, and we’ll give it on America’s gold and then England. It’s happening over and over again. That’s rehypothecation. That’s a Ponzi scheme that I believe happened at the Federal Reserve, and it’s starting to fall apart.

Now, picture this deal happening over and over and over again since 1950, hundreds and thousands of times. Subprime crisis, do you remember that? Imagine that crash on a global scale and instead of houses, it’s gold which backs all of our money and gold that is not really owned by anyone. Our money becomes worthless. Not a good Ponzi scheme, right? Everything collapses.

The Fed’s no different right now, but I believe it’s worse than this. I believe not only did they rehypothecate all of the gold, but they also said you know what, I’m going to sell this to somebody else because I as the bank also want that money. Oh, and I’m going to take the German money, this gold, and I’m going to sell this one to somebody else too because I as a bank need some money.

Forget about the countries. We’ve already sold the gold to each other over and over again, but then they just started taking the gold and selling it themselves. Wait a minute, the Federal Reserve, remember what got me here is the Federal Reserve cannot pay Germany back a relatively little sum that happens, a little sum, not this big box, just a little box of their gold. They can’t do it. And when they start asking for it, they stall.

And then something weird happens, nobody’s allowed to peek into the vault. Do you remember Geraldo at Al Capone’s vault when nothing was there, and it was kind of a letdown? This time it won’t be a letdown if nothing’s there. A German reporter with over three decades of experience in financial reporting asked on December 27 Germany’s Bundesbank, their central bank, why the Federal Reserve melted down the gold that was returned.

Here is his e-mail: “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen: I am an independent financial journalist. In connection with the transfer of 37 tons of Bundesbank gold from New York to Germany, I came across the news that the bars were a melted before the transfer. May I kindly ask you the following information: Why were the bars melted at all? And why couldn’t that wait until the bars arrived in Frankfurt? Kind regards, Lars Schall.” Great question, Lars.

The bank’s answer wasn’t really an answer at all. They explained that they have a new storage concept to ensure that certain specifications are met. They claimed the bars had to be melted to meet these specifications – uh huh. Why in the world would you need to melt it down before it got to Germany? Have you ever seen the movie The Italian Job? What’s on that bar? It’s stamped with a dancer, right?

Now, I don’t know what Germany’s has on it. I don’t know, maybe a big beer stein or something, but they’re all stamped. And why are gold bars stamped like that? Do you remember in the movie? What did they say? Everybody knew. Remember, that’s why the one guy got it in the head because he was like oh, this is – BOOM! Everybody knew who owned that gold. That’s why every country stamps it, to authenticate the weight and the purity.

Let’s talk about purity for a second. A few years ago, several years ago, the Fed had to respond to reports that damage had happened to Britain’s gold when Britain asked for some of its gold back and left it with a purity of just 91%. What does that mean? Again, I go to the bank, I give them this, and then I say what’s the purity of this? It was 99.9% pure when I gave it. If it’s 91% pure, there’s a problem.

When you melt down these bars and send them back, you negate the authenticity. We’re not able to send them the right amount of gold at all. We’re not able to send them their actual bars of gold. That’s a red flag to me, and it should have every American and every press organization up in arms asking questions. I believe what’s happening is far worse than rehypothecation.

Not only were the Feds playing the Ponzi scheme of rehypothecation, a game on each other over and over and they all knew it, all the central banks, but I believe they’re also physically selling everyone’s gold. And now they can’t reproduce the stamp, and so they’re coming up with whatever they can.

Remember, when Britain complained that their money was repatriated gold, it was returned with a small piece of impurity. Well, when you have access to that much gold, skimming it becomes quite tempting. Does anybody have a quarter on them? Nobody actually carries any cash anymore. If you think about a quarter or a dollar, you know, an actual coin – you have a quarter? Somebody actually uses the drink machine.

When you think about a quarter, I want you just to think about the thin part for just a second, this part. Pull in as tight as you can, this part, the edge. Is it smooth, or does it have ridges like Ruffles? It’s ridgy, right? Why? Why are those ridges there? Because if you skim it, it becomes less valuable. Think of it like the scene from Indiana Jones. Do you remember this scene? Do we have this? Yeah, remember?

This is the most ridiculous thing because you know how heavy that would be if it was pure gold? But anyway, he takes the sand. It’s not quite enough, so he has to pour a little bit out. Now, what people used to do is they would skim a little bit. This is a very old coin. This is from the time of Christ. This is from the year of the crucifixion. This is a piece of silver.

If you look at this coin, you can see – pull in as tight as you can. If you look at this coin, you can see that it is uneven. Pull in. There you go. It is uneven, and parts of it are cut off. The back is even better to see. Parts of the stamping have been cut off. Why? Because over 2,000 years because it’s solid silver, people would take a little bit and just shave a little bit off. That’s why those ridges are on the quarter, they shaved just a little bit off.

That’s what happened to England when they got 92%. They just shaved a little bit. The world needs to demand accountability from the Federal Reserve. I don’t think it’s going to end well when we do. In fact, I think it ends horribly for everyone but better face the facts right now. The world needs to demand to see proof that America still has its gold, and we still stand for something.

Now, maybe this is just a giant mix-up, and all of it can easily be explained by coincidence. I can’t think of a way it does. My gut tells me that’s not the case. It tells me the more likely scenario is the Fed is playing games, more specifically stealing through a massive Ponzi scheme, and when the rest of the world who has been in on part of that, the rehypothecation, realizes that the Fed and U.S. government perhaps has been taking the gold, not just theirs, yours as well, to fund their addiction to spending or to give the banks more money, there is nothing of value in those vaults, and there is nothing that anyone will put any trust in. The chickens come home to roost.

We have never seen theft like this before. How would you feel if you went to the bank, and they couldn’t give you back anything, your wedding ring, or any of your other valuables? When you got back, they handed you this, except it really was plastic, but it wasn’t plastic when you gave it to them. That’s what’s happening, I think, right now, and it’s happening to Germany. And it will at some point happen when people all over the world and hopefully our country start demanding to see the vaults and the gold.

When the people busted down the doors only to find nothing, what happens to those bankers? What happens to Americans? You will be blamed for stealing the world’s treasure. America is the globe’s banker, and it is only a matter of time before all of the world and the rest of us as well find out we’ve got nothing. Who does?

Americans expose Supreme Court’s flag ruling as a failed relic

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In a nation where the Stars and Stripes symbolize the blood-soaked sacrifices of our heroes, President Trump's executive order to crack down on flag desecration amid violent protests has ignited fierce debate. But in a recent poll, Glenn asked the tough question: Can Trump protect the Flag without TRAMPLING free speech? Glenn asked, and you answered—thousands weighed in on this pressing clash between free speech and sacred symbols.

The results paint a picture of resounding distrust toward institutional leniency. A staggering 85% of respondents support banning the burning of American flags when it incites violence or disturbs the peace, a bold rejection of the chaos we've seen from George Floyd riots to pro-Palestinian torchings. Meanwhile, 90% insist that protections for burning other flags—like Pride or foreign banners—should not be treated the same as Old Glory under the First Amendment, exposing the hypocrisy in equating our nation's emblem with fleeting symbols. And 82% believe the Supreme Court's Texas v. Johnson ruling, shielding flag burning as "symbolic speech," should not stand without revision—can the official story survive such resounding doubt from everyday Americans weary of government inaction?

Your verdict sends a thunderous message: In this divided era, the flag demands defense against those who exploit freedoms to sow disorder, without trampling the liberties it represents. It's a catastrophic failure of the establishment to ignore this groundswell.

Want to make your voice heard? Check out more polls HERE.

Labor Day began as a political payoff to Socialist agitators

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During your time off this holiday, remember the man who started it: Peter J. McGuire, a racist Marxist who co-founded America’s first socialist party.

Labor Day didn’t begin as a noble tribute to American workers. It began as a negotiation with ideological terrorists.

In the late 1800s, factory and mine conditions were brutal. Workers endured 12-to-15-hour days, often seven days a week, in filthy, dangerous environments. Wages were low, injuries went uncompensated, and benefits didn’t exist. Out of desperation, Americans turned to labor unions. Basic protections had to be fought for because none were guaranteed.

Labor Day wasn’t born out of gratitude. It was a political payoff to Marxist radicals who set trains ablaze and threatened national stability.

That era marked a seismic shift — much like today. The Industrial Revolution, like our current digital and political upheaval, left millions behind. And wherever people get left behind, Marxists see an opening.

A revolutionary wedge

This was Marxism’s moment.

Economic suffering created fertile ground for revolutionary agitation. Marxists, socialists, and anarchists stepped in to stoke class resentment. Their goal was to turn the downtrodden into a revolutionary class, tear down the existing system, and redistribute wealth by force.

Among the most influential agitators was Peter J. McGuire, a devout Irish Marxist from New York. In 1874, he co-founded the Social Democratic Workingmens Party of North America, the first Marxist political party in the United States. He was also a vice president of the American Federation of Labor, which would become the most powerful union in America.

McGuire’s mission wasn’t hidden. He wanted to transform the U.S. into a socialist nation through labor unions.

That mission soon found a useful symbol.

In the 1880s, labor leaders in Toronto invited McGuire to attend their annual labor festival. Inspired, he returned to New York and launched a similar parade on Sept. 5 — chosen because it fell halfway between Independence Day and Thanksgiving.

The first parade drew over 30,000 marchers who skipped work to hear speeches about eight-hour workdays and the alleged promise of Marxism. The parade caught on across the country.

Negotiating with radicals

By 1894, Labor Day had been adopted by 30 states. But the federal government had yet to make it a national holiday. A major strike changed everything.

In Pullman, Illinois, home of the Pullman railroad car company, tensions exploded. The economy tanked. George Pullman laid off hundreds of workers and slashed wages for those who remained — yet refused to lower the rent on company-owned homes.

That injustice opened the door for Marxist agitators to mobilize.

Sympathetic railroad workers joined the strike. Riots broke out. Hundreds of railcars were torched. Mail service was disrupted. The nation’s rail system ground to a halt.

President Grover Cleveland — under pressure in a midterm election year — panicked. He sent 12,000 federal troops to Chicago. Two strikers were killed in the resulting clashes.

With the crisis spiraling and Democrats desperate to avoid political fallout, Cleveland struck a deal. Within six days of breaking the strike, Congress rushed through legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.

It was the first of many concessions Democrats would make to organized labor in exchange for political power.

What we really celebrated

Labor Day wasn’t born out of gratitude. It was a political payoff to Marxist radicals who set trains ablaze and threatened national stability.

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What we celebrated was a Canadian idea, brought to America by the founder of the American Socialist Party, endorsed by racially exclusionary unions, and made law by a president and Congress eager to save face.

It was the first of many bones thrown by the Democratic Party to union power brokers. And it marked the beginning of a long, costly compromise with ideologues who wanted to dismantle the American way of life — from the inside out.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Durham annex EXPOSES Soros, Pentagon ties to Deep State machine

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The Durham annex and ODNI report documents expose a vast network of funders and fixers — from Soros’ Open Society Foundations to the Pentagon.

In a column earlier this month, I argued the deep state is no longer deniable, thanks to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. I outlined the structural design of the deep state as revealed by two recent declassifications: Gabbard’s ODNI report and the Durham annex released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

These documents expose a transnational apparatus of intelligence agencies, media platforms, think tanks, and NGOs operating as a parallel government.

The deep state is funded by elite donors, shielded by bureaucracies, and perpetuated by operatives who drift between public office and private influence without accountability.

But institutions are only part of the story. This web of influence is made possible by people — and by money. This follow-up to the first piece traces the key operatives and financial networks fueling the deep state’s most consequential manipulations, including the Trump-Russia collusion hoax.

Architects and operatives

At the top of the intelligence pyramid sits John Brennan, President Obama’s CIA director and one of the principal architects of the manipulated 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence, signed off on that same ICA and later joined 50 other former officials in concluding the Hunter Biden laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” ahead of the 2020 election. The timing, once again, served a political objective.

James Comey, then FBI director, presided over Crossfire Hurricane. According to the Durham annex, he also allowed the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server to collapse after it became entangled with “sensitive intelligence” revealing her plan to tie President Donald Trump to Russia.

That plan, as documented in the annex, originated with Hillary Clinton herself and was personally pushed by President Obama. Her campaign, through law firm Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS, which commissioned the now-debunked Steele dossier — a document used to justify surveillance warrants on Trump associates.

Several individuals orbiting the Clinton operation have remained influential. Jake Sullivan, who served as President Biden’s national security adviser, was a foreign policy aide to Clinton during her 2016 campaign. He was named in 2021 as a figure involved in circulating the collusion narrative, and his presence in successive Democratic administrations suggests institutional continuity.

Andrew McCabe, then the FBI’s deputy director, approved the use of FISA warrants derived from unverified sources. His connection to the internal “insurance policy” discussion — described in a 2016 text by FBI official Peter Strzok to colleague Lisa Page — underscores the Bureau’s political posture during that election cycle.

The list of political enablers is long but revealing:

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who, as a former representative from California, chaired the House Intelligence Committee at the time and publicly promoted the collusion narrative while having access to intelligence that contradicted it.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), both members of the “Gang of Eight” with oversight of intelligence operations, advanced the same narrative despite receiving classified briefings.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, exchanged encrypted text messages with a Russian lobbyist in efforts to speak with Christopher Steele.

These were not passive recipients of flawed intelligence. They were participants in its amplification.

The funding networks behind the machine

The deep state’s operations are not possible without financing — much of it indirect, routed through a nexus of private foundations, quasi-governmental entities, and federal agencies.

George Soros’ Open Society Foundations appear throughout the Durham annex. In one instance, Open Society Foundations documents were intercepted by foreign intelligence and used to track coordination between NGOs and the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump strategy.

This system was not designed for transparency but for control.

Soros has also been a principal funder of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which ran a project during the Trump administration called the Moscow Project, dedicated to promoting the Russia collusion narrative.

The Tides Foundation and Arabella Advisors both specialize in “dark money” donor-advised funds that obscure the source and destination of political funding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the biggest donor to the Arabella Advisors by far, which routed $127 million through Arabella’s network in 2020 alone and nearly $500 million in total.

The MacArthur Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation also financed many of the think tanks named in the Durham annex, including the Council on Foreign Relations.

Federal funding pipelines

Parallel to the private networks are government-funded influence operations, often justified under the guise of “democracy promotion” or counter-disinformation initiatives.

USAID directed $270 million to Soros-affiliated organizations for overseas “democracy” programs, a significant portion of which has reverberated back into domestic influence campaigns.

The State Department funds the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-governmental organization with a $315 million annual budget and ties to narrative engineering projects.

The Department of Homeland Security underwrote entities involved in online censorship programs targeting American citizens.

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Pentagon, from 2020 to 2024, awarded over $2.4 trillion to private contractors — many with domestic intelligence capabilities. It also directed $1.4 billion to select think tanks since 2019.

According to public records compiled by DataRepublican, these tax-funded flows often support the very actors shaping U.S. political discourse and global perception campaigns.

Not just domestic — but global

What these disclosures confirm is that the deep state is not a theory. It is a documented structure — funded by elite donors, shielded by bureaucracies, and perpetuated by operatives who drift between public office and private influence without accountability.

This system was not designed for transparency but for control. It launders narratives, neutralizes opposition, and overrides democratic will by leveraging the very institutions meant to protect it.

With the Durham annex and the ODNI report, we now see the network's architecture and its actors — names, agencies, funding trails — all laid bare. What remains is the task of dismantling it before its next iteration takes shape.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The truth behind ‘defense’: How America was rebranded for war

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Donald Trump emphasizes peace through strength, reminding the world that the United States is willing to fight to win. That’s beyond ‘defense.’

President Donald Trump made headlines this week by signaling a rebrand of the Defense Department — restoring its original name, the Department of War.

At first, I was skeptical. “Defense” suggests restraint, a principle I consider vital to U.S. foreign policy. “War” suggests aggression. But for the first 158 years of the republic, that was the honest name: the Department of War.

A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

The founders never intended a permanent standing army. When conflict came — the Revolution, the War of 1812, the trenches of France, the beaches of Normandy — the nation called men to arms, fought, and then sent them home. Each campaign was temporary, targeted, and necessary.

From ‘war’ to ‘military-industrial complex’

Everything changed in 1947. President Harry Truman — facing the new reality of nuclear weapons, global tension, and two world wars within 20 years — established a full-time military and rebranded the Department of War as the Department of Defense. Americans resisted; we had never wanted a permanent army. But Truman convinced the country it was necessary.

Was the name change an early form of political correctness? A way to soften America’s image as a global aggressor? Or was it simply practical? Regardless, the move created a permanent, professional military. But it also set the stage for something Truman’s successor, President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower, famously warned about: the military-industrial complex.

Ike, the five-star general who commanded Allied forces in World War II and stormed Normandy, delivered a harrowing warning during his farewell address: The military-industrial complex would grow powerful. Left unchecked, it could influence policy and push the nation toward unnecessary wars.

And that’s exactly what happened. The Department of Defense, with its full-time and permanent army, began spending like there was no tomorrow. Weapons were developed, deployed, and sometimes used simply to justify their existence.

Peace through strength

When Donald Trump said this week, “I don’t want to be defense only. We want defense, but we want offense too,” some people freaked out. They called him a warmonger. He isn’t. Trump is channeling a principle older than him: peace through strength. Ronald Reagan preached it; Trump is taking it a step further.

Just this week, Trump also suggested limiting nuclear missiles — hardly the considerations of a warmonger — echoing Reagan, who wanted to remove missiles from silos while keeping them deployable on planes.

The seemingly contradictory move of Trump calling for a Department of War sends a clear message: He wants Americans to recognize that our military exists not just for defense, but to project power when necessary.

Trump has pointed to something critically important: The best way to prevent war is to have a leader who knows exactly who he is and what he will do. Trump signals strength, deterrence, and resolve. You want to negotiate? Great. You don’t? Then we’ll finish the fight decisively.

That’s why the world listens to us. That’s why nations come to the table — not because Trump is reckless, but because he means what he says and says what he means. Peace under weakness invites aggression. Peace under strength commands respect.

Trump is the most anti-war president we’ve had since Jimmy Carter. But unlike Carter, Trump isn’t weak. Carter’s indecision emboldened enemies and made the world less safe. Trump’s strength makes the country stronger. He believes in peace as much as any president. But he knows peace requires readiness for war.

Names matter

When we think of “defense,” we imagine cybersecurity, spy programs, and missile shields. But when we think of “war,” we recall its harsh reality: death, destruction, and national survival. Trump is reminding us what the Department of Defense is really for: war. Not nation-building, not diplomacy disguised as military action, not endless training missions. War — full stop.

Chip Somodevilla / Staff | Getty Images

Names matter. Words matter. They shape identity and character. A Department of Defense implies passivity, a posture of reaction. A Department of War recognizes the truth: The military exists to fight and, if necessary, to win decisively.

So yes, I’ve changed my mind. I’m for the rebranding to the Department of War. It shows strength to the world. It reminds Americans, internally and externally, of the reality we face. The Department of Defense can no longer be a euphemism. Our military exists for war — not without deterrence, but not without strength either. And we need to stop deluding ourselves.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.