From John Paul Jones to the Gulf of America: Trump’s Pier-Side Naval Academy Spectacle

A 250th-anniversary celebration at Norfolk turned campaign rally, complete with imaginary victories, renamed oceans, and the shadow hand of Stephen Miller

Trump’s Navy birthday party was supposed to be a sober celebration of 250 years at sea; instead, it sailed straight into Trump Harbor, where every ship is named after him and the tide only goes one way. The afternoon opened with the usual stadium soundtrack, patriotic bangers, a PA system allergic to silence, and Melania reading a polished tribute to sailors’ skill and sacrifice. Then the main act arrived to Lee Greenwood like a professional wrestler entering the ring, and any lingering hope of a conventional ceremony slipped overboard without a life vest.

He began as presidents often do, thanking sailors, invoking John Paul Jones, “Don’t give up the ship,” D-Day, Iwo Jima, dutifully working through the set list of naval legend, before immediately swerving into the part where the Navy’s greatest triumphs share top billing with… Donald J. Trump. The carriers around us, he assured the crowd, were “a combined 150,000 tons of pure American naval supremacy and two colossal reasons why no one should ever want to start a fight with the USA.” Fair enough, though within moments he was back to the soliloquy of Trump himself. “We’re putting out a lot of fights, though. Do you see that? We’re going to be close to number eight,” he said, like a man tallying up rounds of golf instead of wars. “We have another one that’s taken 3,000 years, and we’re pretty close, but I don’t want to talk about it until it’s done.” No citation, but plenty of confidence, as though the Navy’s 250th anniversary wasn’t about the fleet at all but about Trump single-handedly solving conflicts older than recorded history.

Then came the rebrand. In Trump’s telling, the Pentagon is once again the War Department because “Defense” was too woke, and Pete Hegseth is your “Secretary of War,” which he said with the same glee a kid gets when they first learn the word “kaboom.” Ditto the geography lesson: apparently the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America, a move he claimed survived a courtroom battle against the Associated Press and “threw them out” of court. Reality check: AP won the case, the courts affirmed that the White House could not bar AP from events over its refusal to adopt Trump’s naming preference.

But this isn’t just Trump being Trump, it’s part of the oldest play in the strongman’s playbook. Autocrats rewrite history by renaming it, recasting it, and forcing everyone else to mouth the new words as though the old ones never existed. In Orbán’s Hungary, in Putin’s Russia, in every fragile democracy sliding toward authoritarianism, the language is the first thing that gets occupied. “Department of Defense” becomes “War Department.” The Gulf of Mexico becomes the “Gulf of America.” Before you know it, dissent becomes “treason,” journalists become “enemies of the people,” and suddenly you’re standing at attention while a leader congratulates himself for personally renaming the ocean.

Naturally, there was a secret mission. Trump unveiled “Operation Midnight Hammer,” an action-movie title for what he claimed was the obliteration of Iran’s nuclear sites via B-2 bombers and 30 submarine-launched Tomahawks, each missile hitting like a Hollywood cutscene. “Every one of them hit,” he bragged, before assuring the crowd that “Iran was not particularly thrilled.” He even quoted the pilots telling him they’d been waiting for his green light: “For 22 years, our predecessors and us trained for that hit… but it was only when you came along that we did it.” Convenient oral history, especially given that no independent reporting suggests Iran’s nuclear program has been “obliterated.” The strikes, while real enough, were nowhere near as lethal to Iran’s infrastructure as Trump claimed, Tehran’s enrichment facilities remain intact, its scientists still at work. But don’t worry, he said, if Iran tries again, “we’re not going to wait so long.” Efficient, if not exactly accurate.

In case the ocean wasn’t getting enough attention, he let us know the Navy had single-handedly ended maritime drug smuggling. “Boats? Gone. Fishermen? Terrified,” he quipped, as though centuries of narcotics trafficking could be wished away with a sound bite. But the reality is grimmer. The recent Caribbean strikes were not Coast Guard seizures with arrests and prosecutions; they were military bombings of small vessels, some in international waters, with no public evidence the crews posed a violent threat. International law calls that a problem. Domestic law does too. Legal scholars have already warned these operations edge into extrajudicial killing, since drug smuggling, even on the high seas, doesn’t transform a fisherman into a lawful combatant.

And that’s not just Trump’s legal problem. By treating the cartels as “unlawful combatants” and ordering sailors to pull the trigger on vessels that may have been smuggling contraband but weren’t engaged in hostilities, he’s also dragging rank-and-file service members into legal jeopardy. The Nuremberg principle, still on the books, is crystal clear: “just following orders” is no defense when those orders violate the laws of war. If a future court decides these strikes were illegal, it won’t be Trump who pays the price. It will be the men and women he cajoled into firing Tomahawks at questionable targets, left to explain why they obeyed commands that may have been unlawful from the start.

And looming behind all this is the ideological hand on the tiller, Stephen Miller. Trump may supply the theatrics, but Miller is the one turning them into doctrine: the unilateral renaming of oceans, the criminalization of migrants as “terrorists,” the normalization of treating drug runners as enemy combatants. In our shutdown discussion we traced Miller’s quiet role as a kind of shadow president, rewriting policy in ways that shred precedent while Trump riffs about “boats gone.”

It’s not new. Miller has always been the guy whispering the ugliest lines into Trump’s teleprompter. Family separations at the border? Miller. The Muslim ban? Miller. The move to label cartels as terrorist groups and use that as legal cover for drone strikes? Miller. The reflexive gutting of asylum law, refugee caps, and “wokeness” in the ranks? Miller. He has a gift for finding the most punitive, legally dubious option in any policy menu and dressing it up as patriotic necessity. Trump plays the carnival barker, but Miller provides the blueprint that makes authoritarian spectacle operational.

These extrajudicial strikes at sea are just the latest extension of that Miller doctrine, the militarization of every social ill, the conversion of migrants, addicts, and even fishermen into enemy combatants, and the steady corrosion of law until illegality looks like leadership. Trump may boast that “fishermen are terrified,” but it’s Miller’s pen that rewrote terror into policy and left America’s sailors exposed to the fallout.

Between promises of pay raises, held up by those dastardly Democrats and their love of “illegal aliens,” he sprinkled in the standard culture-war sampler: no men in women’s sports, no wokeness in the ranks, no open borders, and absolutely no shortage of applause lines about SEALs so tough even the SEALs would blush. Recruiting, he said, is roaring; 2025 was the Navy’s “single best” year ever, and there’s now a waiting list to put on the uniform. To give him partial credit: the Navy is hitting its goal early, it contracted 40,600 sailors three months ahead of schedule, and it beat its 2024 goal of 40,600 by 378, the highest number since 2002. But the “single best ever” claim ignores the fact that it’s not unprecedented by historic standards, and that recruitment policy has been loosened, accepting lower-scoring and non-diploma recruits, to hit those lofty numbers. In short: yes, the Navy is surging, but Trump stripes on the uniform aren’t all merit.

History class kept interrupting the rally long enough to introduce a centenarian D-Day sailor, list admirals like baseball cards, and recount exploits from the Barb to Midway to Normandy. He riffed on Commodore Sinclair as the forefather of the Naval Academy, praised naval aviators who “rain down pain,” submariners who are “25 years ahead” of everyone else, and Marines who remain the universe’s one true definition of “jarhead.” Each segment was punctuated with an aside about himself. At one point he reminded the crowd, “Please remember I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago… I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden and I didn’t like it and you got to take care of him.” At another, he relived his supposed diplomatic triumphs: “In my first term, I was the one that got the Olympics. I was the one that got the World Cup. And I said, you know, the sad part is maybe I’ll go, maybe I won’t even be invited because it won’t be during my term.” Naval history, meet Trump’s personal scrapbook.

He worked the edges of the crowd, too, shout-outs to newly pinned Chiefs, a hundred-year-old veteran who “looks better than I do,” a father-son recruit duo with model-family cheekbones, and a gaggle of women from North Carolina who’ve attended 151 Trump events and, according to him, still have husbands. There was a promise to attend the Army-Navy game paired with a coy “Who will I root for?” as if the Commander-in-Chief needs to keep the academies guessing for suspense.

By the time he wound up to the finale, “fight, fight, fight… win, win, win,” “damn the torpedoes,” “full speed ahead”, the story of the Navy had been expertly braided to the legend of Trump: two and a half centuries of seamanship drafted into service as proof that his instincts are infallible, his critics are wrong, and his unilateral renamings of departments and bodies of water are just facts we haven’t caught up to yet. The band struck up again, the crowd applauded the flag, and the first family exited to the same heat-soaked playlist that opened the show.

If you came for a commemoration of naval history, you got one, clipped to the prow of a campaign speech barreling at flank speed. If you came for verifiable policy, you left with a handful of slogans, a classified-sounding blockbuster, and a newly discovered gulf. But if you came for the essence of the Trump era distilled through a boatswain’s pipe and a stadium PA, pageantry, bravado, grievance, and a promise that the world will bend if you say it loudly enough, you absolutely got your money’s worth. Now batten the hatches; by his count we’re up to seven wars prevented, one 3,000-year conflict nearly solved, and the Navy’s 251st year already off to a roaring start in the Gulf of Whatever He’s Calling It.