Sean Penn won the Best Actor Academy Award for 2008’s film Milk, even beating out Brad Pitt.
Context
In 2016, President Obama’s Navy Secretary Ray Mabus named a ship after Harvey Milk, the openly gay San Francisco politician assassinated in 1978. Milk served in the Navy himself, in the 1950s, but resigned after questions arose about his sexual orientation.
(Openly gay people couldn’t serve in the U.S. military until Congress enacted the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010.)
In June 2025, President Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Navy Secretary John Phelan to rename the ship.
A few weeks later, Hegseth unveiled the new namesake: Oscar V. Peterson, a Navy chief petty officer posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor after he was killed in action during World War II. Peterson was married to a woman.
CBS News reported that the Navy is also considering potentially renaming Obama-era and Biden-era ships named after liberal icons, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman, Thurgood Marshall, Dolores Huerta, Lucy Stone, Cesar Chavez, and Medgar Evers.
What the bill does
Current U.S. law allows the Navy secretary to rename any Navy ship. But the Preserving Great Americans’ Legacies Act would ban renaming any ship named after those eight people: Milk, Ginsburg, Tubman, Marshall, Huerta, Stone, Chavez, and Evers.
The House bill was introduced on June 12 by Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA50).
Although there doesn’t appear to be a Senate bill on the subject, which would actually change public policy, Senate Democrats introduced a symbolic resolution “supporting” the current ship names. That was introduced on June 5 by Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA).
What supporters say
Supporters argue the Milk-to-Peterson alteration is yet another example of the Trump administration whitewashing history to highlight certain preferred demographics.
“While Hegseth works to erase the names of these important civic leaders from the fleet, the president also publicly commits to renaming military bases for Confederate leaders,” Rep. Peters said in a press release. “That is a clear values statement by the administration about the America it envisions and asks our servicemembers and their families to serve. It is unacceptable and unreflective of our country.”
“Every sailor deserves to serve on and fight from a ship named after an American who embodies those values we wish to see in our military,” Rep. Peters continued. “That is why the Navy named these ships after such important leaders.”
What opponents say
Opponents counter that the ship would be better named after someone primarily recognized and awarded for their actual military heroism, rather than for their left-wing governance.
“We are taking the politics out of ship naming. We are not renaming the ship to anything political. This is not about political activists, unlike the previous administration,” Hegseth said in a video announcing the change.
“People want to be proud of the ship they’re sailing in,” Hegseth continued. “[Peterson’s] spirit of self-sacrifice and concern for his crewmates was in keeping with the finest traditions of the Navy.”
Odds of passage
The House bill has attracted 17 Democratic cosponsors. It awaits a potential vote in the House Armed Services Committee, unlikely under Republican control.
In the Senate, Sen. Ted Budd (R-NC) blocked that chamber’s symbolic resolution from coming up for a floor vote.
“It’s no secret that the last administration took a top-down approach to the naming of our newest class of [ships],” Sen. Budd said in a Senate floor speech. “In doing so, they broke with important naval customs and traditions, and they robbed the plank owners [a ship’s original crew members] of the chance to name these vessels after what mattered most to them.”
Jesse Rifkin is a freelance journalist with the Fulcrum. Don’t miss his report, Congress Bill Spotlight, on the Fulcrum. Rifkin’s writings about politics and Congress have been published in the Washington Post, Politico, Roll Call, Los Angeles Times, CNN Opinion, GovTrack, and USA Today.
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image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.