The U.S. Is So Over World Peace It Erased the Olive Branch from the Dime

[AStern]

Since 1946, every U.S. dime has been the same, with Franklin D. Roosevelt on the head and a torch centered between an oak branch and an olive branch—the international symbol of peace and diplomacy—on the back. But in the nation’s latest move to shrug off peace or diplomacy of any kind, within the world, with its states, or with its own citizens, we’ve apparently decided we don’t need a pesky olive branch anymore!

In one of the dumbest, most needless aesthetic decisions to come out of Trump’s anti-DEI crusade, the nation’s newest dime replaces the torch with a bald eagle holding arrows in its left talon and gets rid of the olive branch altogether. The design was announced with little fanfare in December, and has been circulating since the beginning of the year—which I hadn’t noticed until reading this op-ed in Fortune on Thursday.

For a nation whose founding symbols were carefully engineered around the balance of peace and war, that omission is hard to read as accidental.

Dropping the olive branch from the dime isn’t just a design choice: it’s a cultural signal. The Founders spent six years perfecting the balance between peace and war on the Great Seal. Erasing half of that equation, on a coin meant to celebrate their legacy and especially 250 years after they fought for “Liberty over Tyranny,” says something about which half the country currently feels like.
Which is some real nickel-and-dime BS. The U.S. has had the “Great Seal” since 1782, which depicts an eagle holding 13 arrows in one claw and an olive branch in another, with its head deliberately turned towards the branch, as a gesture of its dedication to using diplomatic politics before getting aggressive as a last resort. As Fortune writes, Charles Thomson—a Founding Father and one of the seal’s original designers, who died in 1824—said the head positioning was deliberate, and a direct nod to the Olive Branch Petition, when Congress made its independence-winning appeal to Britain in 1775.

https://www.jezebel.com/what-a-wonderful-night-to-watch-kevin-oleary-lose-money

https://fortune.com/2026/03/12/us-mint-drops-olive-branch-dime-peace-war/