Understanding Trump’s Impact on the Great Seal of the United States

The Great Seal of the United States, featuring an eagle, is on the back of the dollar bill. Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, submitted his design for the eagle on June 20, 1782, which the Congress approved that same day. After six years of committees and failed efforts, Thomson’s design symbolized the new nation’s strength and independence.

In the American eagle’s right hand is an olive branch, and a sheaf of arrows in its left.

The eagle’s head is turned toward the olive branch to symbolize that the American people prefer peace to war but are prepared for both. In 1960, the eminent sculptor Theodore Roszak, my uncle by marriage, was commissioned to do a golden American eagle for the façade of the U.S. embassy in London. He was a Polish émigré who had risen in the art world, was part of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, and had taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia University. It was the last full year of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, and the Cold War was in full swing as Cuba went communist, the Vietnam War would soon embroil America, and Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union.

Roszak, an abstract expressionist, created the Eagle sculpture with its terrifying wingspan and lowered beak to symbolize America’s warlike or imperial propensities. Roszak depicted the bird poised on the edge of the building, ready for flight, as if to hunt in an angular, jagged take on the national emblem. Surreptitiously, Roszak fashioned its head toward the sheaf of arrows. He told me he saw the work as a symbol of protest against what he saw as our nation’s benighted shift in preference for war over peace. No one noticed much, and the eagle was mounted where it stands in Grosvenor Square today.

The Qatari government bought the building from the United States during Trump 1.0 in 2017. They renovated the structure for a new hotel but left the eagle in place as an important historic landmark.

U.S. Embassy in London Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In a life-imitates-art moment, Trump is considering an executive order to modify the Great Seal to show the eagle facing right towards the arrows. This is consistent with his latest moves to put the nation on a war footing.

On September 5, by executive order, Trump changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, an action reserved for Congress. He said he wants to be on offense, not defense, as though the nation were a football team. Trump’s pattern of behavior is to ignore Congress if he can get away with it. Faced with the legislative requirement, he said, “We’re doing it,” sounding very much like the wannabe autocrat he is. But in a fig leaf nod to legislative protocol, he said the change was a “secondary title.” The Department of Defense changed its web address to war.gov.

The order—the 200th signed by the president since taking office—authorizes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and DOD subordinate officials to use secondary titles like “Department of War,” “Secretary of War” and “Deputy Secretary of War” in public communications, official correspondence, ceremonial contexts and non-statutory documents within the executive branch, according to a fact sheet released by the White House.

The cabinet office for the nation’s military was known as the War Department from the founding of the Republic in 1789 until 1947, when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Air Force, which had been part of the Army. Technically, the new Leviathan was called the National Military Establishment (NME). However, in 1949, after its awkward acronym (read en-em-y) provoked ridicule, the short-lived title was scrapped, and the Department of Defense was established.

What’s in a name? DOD was a sufficiently macho moniker for 12 presidents, who spawned a legacy of hawkish secretaries, from George C. Marshall to Dick Cheney to Caspar Weinberger. But the appellation apparently didn’t work for Fox & Friends Weekend’s Pete Hegseth. Trump, whose bone spurs kept him from Vietnam but not golf, recently touted an AI-generated image of himself as the fictional Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore from the 1979 film Apocalypse Now in front of the Chicago skyline with military helicopters and flames, and the caption “Chipocalypse Now.” Kilgore loved the war in Vietnam. His most famous line: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Over the image, Trump’s post read: “‘I love the smell of deportations in the morning…’ Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.” The words were followed by three helicopter emojis, reminding us of Francis Ford Coppola’s film or perhaps of how the Argentine junta and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet disposed of “disappeared” political opponents by pushing them out of helicopters into the sea.

The bluff Illinois Governor JB Pritzker quickly pointed out that Trump’s threat of war against an American city was aberrant: “This is not a joke. This is not normal,” he said. And in Chicago, people took to the streets for the “Chicago Says No Trump No Troops” protest.

Trump dismissed the idea that he was waging war on the city, insisting that he was only targeting its crime.

How all this plays out is anyone’s guess. Soon, American soldiers will go to blue Memphis, Tennessee, at the behest of the state’s MAGA governor and seem primed to do the same in Louisiana. Meanwhile, thousands turned out in Washington, D.C., for the “We Are All D.C.” march to protest troops in the capital. The president holds a unique status as the head of the National Guard in D.C. I wish he had exercised his authority on January 6.

In Chicago, Trump’s claims of rampant crime that state and local authorities can’t handle have no basis in fact. Undeniably, crime in our cities is a problem; it has always been. The deficit and the national debt are also problematic. So are the possibilities of runaway tariff-induced inflation and a recession. So are Ukraine, the contours of Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The statistics show that serious crime is decreasing. The Constitution does not delegate the police power to the federal government.

The Tenth Amendment provides that “[t]he powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” This is federalism, which conservatives point to as reasons why the national government should keep its nose out of local issues, which are, in the words of the Supreme Court, “[p]ublic safety, public health, morality, peace and quiet, law and order.”

The Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, in a 2-1 panel decision, rejected Trump’s attempts to use the Enemy Aliens Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport immigrants he has accused of belonging to a violent Venezuelan street gang. Trump drew on the law’s sweeping powers to round up and expel members of a hostile nation in times of declared war or during an invasion or predatory incursion. But the panel rejected his assertions that the homeland was under invasion by Tren de Aragua, rebuffing the idea that immigration, even at a large scale, was synonymous with a military breach of U.S. borders.

In a 131-page dissenting opinion, Judge Andrew Oldham, whom Trump appointed, floated specious reasoning likely to be adopted by the Supreme Court, excoriating any questioning of the president’s authority:

“Today the majority holds that President Trump is just an ordinary civil litigant,” Judge Oldham wrote.

His declaration of a predatory incursion is not conclusive, far from it. Instead, President Trump must plead sufficient facts—as if he were some run-of-the-mill plaintiff in a breach-of-contract case—to convince a federal judge that he is entitled to relief.

The Supreme Court may adopt this thinking as it upholds every expansion of Trump’s authority.

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway’s quip about bankruptcy, there are two ways to drift into autocracy: gradually, then suddenly.

Today, democracy erodes, more suddenly than gradually, and soon perhaps the American eagle’s head on the Great Seal of the United States will tilt toward the arrow—not as my Uncle Roszak’s parody, but as the embodiment of the Trump era.

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