I have no problem with renaming the Department of Defense into the Department of War, as Donald Trump is trying to do. (It’s technically not up to the president but to Congress, but the Republicans there will oblige him.) After all, that martial label was good enough from George Washington to Harry Truman. And “war” is more honest and descriptive than the somewhat euphemistic “defense.” As Trump put it, “we want to be offensive too if we have to be.” Even that holds water.

But that’s the end of my concurrence with this cosmetic and ridiculous stunt of showmanship. Trump likes to rename things — the Gulf of Mexico/America and such — because doing so looks bold while skirting the complexities and nuances of real policy. Naming is part of turning his presidency into reality TV, and it works to the extent that it grabs our attention. But a new shingle (and URL) outside the Pentagon does not solve the fiendish challenges of running the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard and Space Force. Nor does it signal anything, positive or negative, about strategy.

Strategy — the word comes from the Greek strategos, meaning “general” or “commander” — is the domain that Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, should be concerned with but aren’t. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that war is the continuation by other means of policy — or of politics, the German word Politik could mean either. That has often been misinterpreted as a cynical endorsement of warfare. In fact, Clausewitz meant something closer to the opposite: the need to limit war and subordinate it to achieving clearly defined political objectives. This is what Trump and Hegseth don’t get.

When Trump announced the name change, Hegseth, the Fox News personality who is all-in on Trump’s reality-TV shtick, bloviated again that the new label expresses the “warrior ethos” that he and the president are trying to revive after its alleged near-death under “woke” leaders and elites. The Department of War, Hegseth said, is henceforth about “maximum lethality, not tepid legality, violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.”

To people who think deeply about war, and know that it is hell, this vacuous bellicosity is hard to bear. Christopher Preble, who runs a “grand strategy” program at the Stimson Center in Washington, thinks that the Trump-Hegseth obsession with lethality “risks a focus on killing for killing’s sake, and comes at the expense of strategic clarity.”

Even and especially when a nation has the most powerful military in world history, its leaders need humility and wisdom in deploying that force. America didn’t lose in Iraq and Afghanistan because it was insufficiently lethal — “because it didn’t kill enough Iraqis and Afghans,” as Preble puts it — but because it lacked a strategy that was well considered, realistic and attainable.

What is observable during the second Trump administration so far is not the alignment of military and other means to clearly defined ends, but random displays of violence intended to shock and awe audiences foreign and domestic and to keep up the ratings on the reality-TV presidency.

Thus, Trump just ordered a military strike on a skiff in the Caribbean, killing the 11 men on board, who may or may not have been drug smugglers and whom Trump called “terrorists.” Normally, the Coast Guard would have picked up and dealt with such people. The strike was almost certainly unlawful (notice Hegseth’s disdain for “tepid legality”). But it made for a suspenseful video clip, which Trump of course shared, hinting of more strikes to come.

He and Hegseth seem equally ready to use war — the word and the threat — at home. The president has already deployed the National Guard in some American cities he considers disloyal, forcing Hegseth’s warriors to take a break from lethality to pick up trash and blow leaves. Chicago could be next and, as Trump posted, is “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” He illustrated his threat with an AI image of himself à la Apocalypse Now, with Chicago in the background in place of a burning Vietnam.

This is the same president who habitually confuses aggressor and victim in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who keeps alienating America’s brothers-in-arms, most recently by ending training programs in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, NATO’s front line facing Russia. Who drives a potential ally, India, into the arms of America’s likeliest adversary, China. Who lacks any observable notion of grand strategy — that is, of a plausible plan to Keep America Great and achieve peace through strength.

So go ahead and rename that department. And do prepare for war. But do so with the goal of preventing war, as Harry Truman did when he chose the label “defense” just after witnessing the full genocidal and even nuclear horror of World War II. He and other American leaders of his time had glimpsed hell and wanted to save humanity from it. They hated war far too much to play with the word.

With or without bone spurs, Trump can’t keep impersonating a warrior while calling himself the President of PEACE. And America can’t keep letting him disdain strategy for the sake of show.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

 

Vladimir Putin has been on a roll the past few weeks. First President Donald Trump invited him to Anchorage. Then he got a three-way hug with China’s President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a summit in China. And an invitation to a grand military parade in Beijing.

Since the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Putin had been shunted to the fringes of summit group photos. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he had been treated as a pariah by the United States and Europe. Indicted by the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide, he could travel only to countries that wouldn’t arrest him. In short, Moscow was not being treated with the respect it believed it deserved.

Trump thought that by literally rolling out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska — and clapping as the Russian loped down the red carpet — he could reset the bilateral relationship. And it did. But not the way Trump intended.

The Alaskan summit convinced the Russians that the current administration is willing to throw the sources of American global power out the window.

Trade partners, geopolitical allies and alliances — everything is on the table for Trump. The U.S. president believes this shows his power; the Russians see this as a low-cost opportunity to degrade American influence. Putin was trained by the KGB to recognize weakness and exploit it.

There is no evidence that being friendly to Putin and agreeing with Russian positions are going to make Moscow more willing to stop fighting in Ukraine. Overlooking Russia’s intensifying hybrid attacks on Europe, in February, Vice President JD Vance warned Europe that it should be focusing instead on the threat to democracy “from within.”

This followed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth‘s assurances that Ukraine would never join NATO. Trump has suggested that U.S. support for NATO and Europe is contingent on those countries paying up. In an event that sent Moscow pundits to pop the Champagne, Trump told Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that he just didn’t “have the cards” and should stop trying to beat Russia.

Did any of this bring Putin to the negotiating table? No.

In fact, the Kremlin indicated a readiness to talk with Trump about the war only when Trump threatened “very, very powerful” sanctions in mid-July. This time, he seemed serious about it. The Alaska summit happened a month later. The tougher Trump is with Russia, the more likely he is to get any kind of traction in negotiations. It’s unfortunate that the president has now gone back to vague two-week deadlines for imposing sanctions that never materialize.

Russia believes it will win the war. China has been a steady friend, willing to sell Russia cars and dual-use technology that ends up in drones that are attacking Ukrainian cities. It has also become Russia’s largest buyer of crude oil and coal. Western sanctions have not been biting the Russian economy, though they have nibbled away at state revenues. Europe and the United States have not been willing to apply the kind of economic pressure that would seriously dent Russia’s ability to carry on the war.

Putin keeps saying that a resolution to the war requires that the West address the “root causes” of the war. These causes, for Russia, relate to the way it was treated after losing the Cold War. The three Baltic nations joined Europe as fast as they could. Central and Eastern European countries decided that they would rather be part of NATO than the Warsaw Pact. When Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine started asking for membership in the European Union and NATO, Russia realized it wouldn’t be able to convince them to stay with economic appeal or soft power. It had to use force. Unable to demonstrate the attraction of its suffocating embrace, or the value of its Eurasian Economic Union, Russia believed it had to use force to keep Ukraine by its side. It reminds one of a grotesque Russian expression: “If he beats you, it means he loves you.”

The real “root cause” of the war in Ukraine is Russia’s inability to accept that centuries of empire do not confer the right to dominate former colonies forever. Mongolia learned this. As did the British. And the French. And the Ottomans. The Austro-Hungarians.

Eventually this war will end. But not soon. Russia is insisting on maximalist demands that Ukraine cannot agree to, which include control over territory it hasn’t managed to occupy. Ukraine will not stop fighting until it is sure that Russia will not attack again. Achieving that degree of certainty with flimsy security guarantees is impossible.

In the meantime, Ukrainian cities on the frontline will continue being wiped out, citizens in Kherson will continue being subjects of “human safari” for Russian drone operators, people across Ukraine will continue experiencing daily air raids that send them scurrying into shelters. Soldiers, volunteers, civilians and children will continue dying. Trump appears to care about the thousands of daily casualties. Most of these are Russian soldiers who have been sent to their death by a Russian state that doesn’t see their lives as worth preserving.

Trump is understandably frustrated with his inability to “stop the killing” because he has assumed that satisfying Russian demands is the answer. The opposite is true: Only by showing — proving — to Russia that its demands are unattainable will the U.S. persuade the Kremlin to consider meaningful negotiations. Countries at war come to the negotiating table not because they are convinced to abandon their objectives. They sit down when they realize their goals are unattainable.

Alexandra Vacroux is the vice president for strategic engagement at the Kyiv School of Economics. She wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

 

 

It’s a tale as old as time — or at least, the past three decades. Whether Democratic or Republican, members of Congress angry with the president and searching for some way to fight back against the White House decide to wield the constitutional power of the purse and shut down the federal government.

“We have leverage,” lawmakers have told themselves over the years. “If we hold out, the president will fold and we’ll achieve policy aims we would not have the power to accomplish otherwise.”

It’s a fantasy they talk themselves into believing. It has never worked and it never will.

Even if voters are sympathetic to the holdouts’ demands, the public considers deliberately shutting the lights off in Washington an illegitimate form of political combat. Voters punish the instigators, at least in the short term. Ask Brendan Buck, a Republican operative in Washington who lived this reality during his years on Capitol Hill advising two different GOP speakers of the House.

“It never works,” Buck told me. “No matter how righteous you believe your position is, that gets thrown out the window because all people see is chaos and the consequences of a shutdown and they don’t understand why you can’t just figure that out with the government open.”

Shutting down the government is not simply a political loser, it is a policy loser, too.

“Shutdowns don’t end with a negotiated peace,” he said. “Shutdowns end after one party has endured beatings so long that they ultimately just wave the white flag.”

Let’s review the win-loss record; or should I say, the loss-loss record.

— In late 1995, a unified Republican Congress fought with President Bill Clinton over federal spending levels. The ensuing 21-day government shutdown that stretched past New Year’s Day cost the GOP public support and sent Clinton’s job approval rating soaring from 41% before the shutdown to 55% after.

— In the fall of 2013, a GOP House of Representatives battled President Barack Obama and a Democratic US Senate over funding for the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). After 16 days, House Republicans folded with nothing to show for it except a historically low favorability rating.

— Yet another shutdown, initiated in early 2018 by Senate Democrats amid a disagreement over immigration policy with President Donald Trump, didn’t end quite as badly. But that’s only because these Democrats, then in the minority, abandoned the effort quickly. Perhaps they concluded there was no political upside or guaranteed policy concessions in the offing. Underscoring the point that the perpetrators always lose, Trump one year later tucked tail and agreed to terms with a Democratic House led by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi after voters grew frustrated with the 35-day shutdown he caused.

The outcome of the 2013 Obamacare shutdown is particularly instructive.

The backlash over passage of the 44th president’s signature health care overhaul resulted in massive Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections: 63 House seats and seven Senate seats. Three years later, Obama’s job approval ratings were stuck in the low- to mid-40s; voters were still five years away from changing their minds about Obamacare. Yet when House Republicans, pushed by the activist base of their party, took extraordinary measures to stop the Obama administration from implementing the Affordable Care Act, voters balked.

This is similar to the dilemma facing Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer this month, as Washington stares down the Sept. 30 deadline. The New York Democrat is facing demands from progressive activists, grassroots Democratic voters and even members of his own party in Congress to play hardball with Trump. They want Schumer to use the leverage they imagine Democrats possess, via the Senate filibuster, to force the president to barter on policy.

Ezra Klein, a liberal writer for The New York Times, framed the stakes as even more dire, during a recent episode of his podcast. “Donald Trump is corrupting the government. He’s using it to hound his enemies, to line his pockets, and to entrench his own power. He’s corrupting it the way the mafia would corrupt the industries they controlled,” Klein argued, even as he conceded that shutting down the government is something of a crapshoot. “This is what Donald Trump is doing to the government. This is what Democrats cannot fund. This is what they have to try to stop.”

Klein’s argument has some merit. But it does not change the politics of government shutdowns.

Shutdowns have demonstrated time and again that they simply do not work. Indeed, this cathartic strategy risks boomeranging on Democrats and further empowering Trump. His job approval rating has been holding steady for months at roughly 45%. Voters consistently tell pollsters that what they care about most is not the president’s constitutionally questionable practices, but issues related to the economy — affordability and inflation chief among them.

“The facts and the history are what they are: Whoever forces a shutdown is going to pay a political price for it,” said Larry Ceisler, a public affairs executive in Pennsylvania active in Democratic politics. Schumer so far seems to accept that reality. It’s most likely why he refused to dabble in shutdown politics earlier this year, despite the backlash from some quarters in his own party. But will he be able to resist the siren song of the left again? My guess is that Republicans, staring down the barrel of a difficult 2026 midterm election season, are quietly hoping he won’t.

David M. Drucker is columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”

 

As evictions spike, the Independent Budget Office highlights ongoing challenges in the city’s program to provide free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction.

People entering Brooklyn Housing Court located at 141 Livingston Street on the morning of March 20, 2023.

As evictions climb to pre-pandemic levels, most New Yorkers facing eviction may not be getting the legal representation they are entitled to, according to a new report from the New York City Independent Budget Office.

The report, released Thursday, highlights ongoing challenges with the city’s Right to Counsel program, which promises free legal counsel to low-income tenants facing eviction.

But the report finds that only a fraction—30 percent—of eligible tenants got full legal representation under the program last year.

The report’s authors argue that a rapid expansion in eligibility, changes to eviction law and practices, and plateauing funding for the program means fewer eligible tenants receive help.

“It’s subject to funding availability and staffing availability,” said Independent Budget Office Senior Research and Strategy Officer Sarah Parker. “In some ways that ‘Right to Counsel’ language is a goal, but not a mandate.”

Only half of tenants facing eviction appear in court

To get Right to Counsel in the first place, tenants must show up in court. When they don’t, the housing court can issue a default judgement, an automatic ruling in their landlord’s favor.

There were over 125,000 eviction cases filed in 2024, according to the report.

But despite efforts to educate tenants about their rights, court appearance rates are stubbornly low. Just about half of tenants facing eviction show up, according to IBO’s report. That figure has remained around 50 percent since the program began in 2017.

Lower representation rate

When tenants do show up, they don’t always get lawyers. The rate of representation for eligible tenants plunged 40 percent after the pandemic, according to IBO.

“Outcomes are vastly improved in housing court if you as a tenant have legal representation,” said Parker.

Coming out of the pandemic in 2022, when eviction moratoria were still in place, state and federal initiatives like New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) provided a social safety net. At the time, a smaller subset of the city was eligible for Right to Counsel, and just over half of tenants had a lawyer.

In 2024, just one out of every three eligible tenants citywide facing eviction got legal representation, IBO found.

Of 62,000 cases where tenants appeared in court last year, IBO estimated 50,000 were eligible for the program. But under 15,000 got full representation in court.

Some areas of the city were better served than others. In the last quarter of 2024, 46 percent of Queens households served by the program got full representation in court compared to 31 percent in the Bronx, according to a report from the Office of Civil Justice.

Earlier this year, Comptroller Brad Lander’s office found that the top 10 zip codes for evictions were all in the South and Central Bronx.

In criminal court, Parker points out, cases cannot proceed if a client is not represented. But housing court cases can go forward without representation, despite the city’s promise of counsel to those who qualify for it.

“This is a program that is called right to counsel, but it did not legally establish a right on the part of the tenant to counsel,” said Parker.

As the number of people who received a lawyer to represent them in court declined, more clients used “brief assistance”—a one-time consultation conducted at court or through a hotline. 

That type of assistance did not include representation in housing court, but its use grew 380 percent from 2022 to 2023.

Activists rallied outside Brooklyn Housing Court last month in support of more funding for the Right to Counsel initiative on the morning of March 20, 2023. (Adi Talwar/City Limits)

More clients, same funding

Spending on the Right to Counsel program has increased every year since it started rolling out in 2018, to just under $150 million last year. But the amount has not kept pace with the demand for lawyers.

The number of people eligible for the program tripled from 2019 to 2024, IBO estimates, as legislators expanded eligibility to all tenants with income below 200 percent of the federal poverty level—about $62,000 for a family of four—and to all tenants 60 years or older.

As the program expanded citywide between 2019 and 2024, the number of eligible tenants tripled, increasing 222 percent, according to IBO’s estimate. Program funding went up only 129 percent.

Lawyers working on the program say those funding deficiencies stretch them thin.

“People were leaving because of the case loads, and this is really difficult work,” said Munonyedi Clifford, the attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s citywide housing practice.

“With more money, you can get more lawyers, and you can get more qualified lawyers,” they added.

Longer cases

After the pandemic, eviction cases are taking longer to resolve, IBO observed. Longer cases may actually help improve outcomes for tenants, but can further strain Right to Counsel providers.

IBO found that before the pandemic, 93 percent of cases had a first decision within six months. But in 2023 and 2024, only 54 percent reached a decision within that time frame.

According to one of the report’s authors, Claire Salant, cases are taking longer because of 2019 changes to state law that gave tenants more time to respond to eviction proceedings. But courts are also stretched thin, with a packed calendar and few clerks to schedule hearings, the report said.

“There’s clearly a disconnect between the intent of the program as it was passed in City Council, and as providers and advocates talked about it all when it happened, and where it currently fits today,” said Parker.

As funding plateaus, need may only grow. Evictions recently reached their highest monthly rate since 2018, according to a Gothamist report.

Advocates warn that federal cuts to Medicare and Medicaid could further stress the budgets of low-income households in New York City.

“It’s heartbreaking. Tenants who are eligible for representation and should be getting representation aren’t getting representation because there’s not enough lawyers doing this work right now,” said Clifford.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Patrick@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post Fewer Eligible Tenants Get ‘Right to Counsel’ After Pandemic, Program Expansion: Report appeared first on City Limits.