Donald Trump is, by all accounts, no longer bothering to do much of his presidential duties. He is too busy stewing over his election defeat, overseeing administration efforts to stonewall the Biden-Harris transition, and ordering one last purge of whatever non-loyalists can be found in government ranks. He has given up on even pretending to give a damn about a quarter-million dead Americans on his watch, or on the skyrocketing number of new cases filling up hospitals now. We're now likely entering the stage in which Trump will simply try to do as much damage to the nation as he can, period, out of personal spite.
Which brings us to the next defense bill. Defense spending, as in throwing as much money at the military as the military can absorb and then some, is the one thing that Democratic and Republican lawmakers have been able to agree on for decades. The current defense bill may be on the rocks, however: It contains a bipartisan directive to rename military bases currently named after Confederate leaders—Americans who rebelled against the United States in defense of slavery—and Donald Trump has threatened to veto that.
Because white nationalists and flag-waving Confederacy worshippers make up a vocal chunk of Trump's base, and pandering to them on this issue is, for Trump, both easy to do and personally satisfying.
The New York Times reports that Republican Sen. James Inhofe is now demanding that the provision be taken out before sending the measure to Trump, privately insisting to senators that Trump will veto the whole bill rather than allow the Confederate-named bases to be renamed. While some other senators consider Trump's threat to be a bluff—vetoing an entire defense bill in defense of dead Confederates?—Inhofe personally has assured Trump he'll get the base-naming taken out, according to prior reporting. So he's got a stake in making sure it happens.
Inhofe is not too likely to be successful in convincing senators to back down on this one. Renaming the bases was agreed to in a rare bit of bipartisanship after widespread demonstrations this year, with even Republicans willing to sign on to the effort as a fairly painless way, perhaps, to look good while blocking other, more substantive reforms.
The question becomes, then: Will Trump veto it?
The odds would have to lean heavily toward yes. Trump literally has nothing left to lose. Trump has no remaining purpose other than to solicit praise from the most obsessive (racist) members of his base. Trump certainly will not give a flying damn about anyone's complaints that the move would harm Our Great Military, because Trump has made repeated remarks indicating he considers Our Great Military to be make up of "idiot" generals overseeing rank-and-file "losers." If he doesn't care about literally killing off Americans by stalling pandemic transition measures, he's not going to care about anything else.
So he'll probably veto it, purely as publicity stunt, and the redo will have to wait until the Biden-Harris team is in office and has done the necessary hosing-down of various White House rooms and government departments. The clown will clown to the end. It doesn't matter if you're paying him or not: At this point, he's going to finish his little backyard show.