Changing a thing’s name doesn’t change what it is.Mother Jones illustration; Amy Katz/ZUMA; Getty
At 11:00 PM Sunday night, Donald Trump endorsed a conservative influencer’s suggestion that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should be renamed National Immigration and Customs Enforcement (NICE), “so the media has to say NICE Agents all day everyday.”
“GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT .” the President wrote. He has rarely been able to resist the magic of a good rebranding opportunity. Days after his inauguration, Trump announced that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be known as the “Gulf of America,” though that name has not caught on in the year since.
A few months later, he renamed the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
This, at least, was an honest move. The United States has been at peace for fewer than 20 years out of its 250-year history; calling our nation’s war-making machine the Department of Defense has always been a euphemistic choice.
Some of his renaming attempts have been more baldly self-centered: see the recently-re-dubbed Trump-Kennedy Center.
But none of these rebrands, no matter their motives, have reshaped the realities of the things they name: the gulf is still the gulf, whether of Mexico or of America. The Department of Defense or War is still vacuuming up over half the federal government’s discretionary budget in order to bomb at least seven different countries during Trump’s second term.
And whether National is tacked onto ICE or not, they’ll still be the same agency: bloated, overfunded, and killing roughly one person in their custody per week.