President Donald Trump spends a lot of time bragging about how many wars he has ended, on account of what a peaceful guy he is. He’s ended eight wars! (Spoiler alert: he has not ended eight wars.) So why did he just start an entirely illegal, brutal attack on Iran? For peace!
“The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!” Trump shared on his Truth Social on Saturday afternoon.
“Peace of the action” by Jack Ohman
The right wing spent years whining about how anything they didn’t like was Orwellian, straight out of 1984, but for sheer doublespeak, it’s really tough to beat Trump’s assertion that war is peace.
Before running for office Trump pretended to stake out a claim that he was very concerned about then-President Barack Obama’s ostensibly warlike tendencies. According to Trump, Obama was going to start a war with Iran to get reelected or because Obama sucked at negotiating.
Of course, Obama did not start a war with Iran, but all of this bluster from Trump landed with the most credulous people. It’s impossible to forget Maureen Dowd’s ridiculous “Hillary the Hawk, Donald the Dove” piece from 2016. Dowd clearly bought—hook, line, and sinker—Trump’s argument that evil hawkish Hillary was part of the “failed policy of nation-building and regime change that Hillary Clinton pushed in Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria.” That regime change without plans for what comes next creates “power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists.” If Trump won, he said he would “abandon the policy of reckless regime change favored by my opponent.”
During the 2024 election, Republicans pushed the absurd lie that Trump and JD Vance were the pro-peace ticket. Vance stumped for the ticket by lavishing praise on Trump as the “candidate of peace.” At Trump’s final rally in 2024, he boasted that he would “stop the chaos in the Middle East. I will prevent World War III.”
How’s that working out?
Anyone paying even the slightest attention during Trump’s first term could see that he wasn’t all that interested in peace. During that time he increased our military entanglements in the Persian Gulf, and despite his promises to leave Afghanistan, that was actually left for Joe Biden to take care of. He bombed Syria twice and killed Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian military leader who headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force.
And since returning to office, Trump has been a busy, brutal boy. In 2025, he bombed Venezuela, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and, of course, Iran. There’s no world where he is keeping the United States out of conflicts or striving for peace.
Trump often gets described as an isolationist, but that’s only true in a very narrow sense, which is that he has no interest in participating in global affairs. Rather, he’s much more of an imperialist. He wants America to control other countries, to create a sphere of influence based on might and threats and attacks.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the head of Trump’s Department of War, which sure sounds peaceful
And about that whole regime change thing. It isn’t just Trump who denounced regime change only to turn around and get super-into regime change. Last December, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the Department of Defense would not be “distracted by democracy-building interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing, and feckless nation building.”
Of course, that’s exactly what is happening. Well, it’s more of the first part of regime change—attacking a country to kidnap or kill their leaders—that Trump likes. He’s not really into the follow-up, where there is actually a plan for what comes next.
Less than a month after Hegseth drew his line in the sand, the United States dropped troops into Venezuela to capture President Nicolás Maduro. Trump then said that the United States would somehow run Venezuela, though what seems to really be happening is that the Venezuelan government remains largely intact, even without Maduro.
Iran is playing out in a similar fashion. The United States has stormed in and toppled the existing leadership there, but there is no plan for what comes next. Trump told the Iranian people to “take over your government” and that it would probably be “your only chance for generations.” Sen. Lindsey Graham hit the Sunday shows to justify this illegal war and explained that we attacked Iran so that it “cannot become again the largest state sponsor of terrorism.” When asked if Trump had a plan for that, Graham declared, “No, it’s not his job.”
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LINDSEY GRAHAM: Our goal is to make sure Iran cannot become again the largest state sponsor of terrorism.
WELKER: Does the the president have a plan to guarantee that happens?
GRAHAM: No. It's not his job.
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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) March 1, 2026 at 10:35 AM
Got it. So Trump’s only job is to attack, to destroy, to eliminate existing regimes and then just bounce, leaving a trail of destruction and no help or guidance for what comes next.
But according to Trump and his sycophants, this is what peace looks like. And Trump would know, what with “winning” the FIFA Peace Prize and all. Trump’s hypocrisy here is breathtaking, and we are in no way obliged to pretend that war is peace, even as he insists it is.
