NOT EXACTLY GANDHI

All the Times Trump, 79, Claimed He Was the ‘Peace President’ Before Bombing Iran

Trump promised “no new wars,” then launched military operations across three continents.

Warmongering President Donald Trump is failing spectacularly to live up to the much-repeated boast that he is the “Peace President.”

Trump, 79, vowed he would start “no new wars,” and has insisted again and again that after apparently stopping multiple conflicts, he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—an obsession he has refused to let go of.

Trump’s actions, including the latest announcement of a foreign bombing campaign, which saw him confirm on Saturday that the U.S. had begun “major combat operations in Iran,” do not back his words. They now sound even more hollow than ever.

It is the second time in eight months the self-styled “peace president” has bombed the country. It comes less than two months after he attacked Venezuela.

In fact, Trump’s second term has seen him launch military operations across three continents.

The myth-making started years ago. In his 2021 farewell address, Trump crowed that he was “especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars,” a line that quickly became a MAGA talking point and campaign slogan.

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As he left office, he was already hailing his “record of no new wars” as proof he was a different kind of commander in chief.

On his re-election night in November 2024, he had told supporters he was “not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.”

Since retaking office, Trump has tried to uphold the branding—even as he dropped bombs.

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The Nobel Peace Prize became the ultimate validation he craved. He has lobbied so aggressively throughout his second term that he personally called Norway’s finance minister, Jens Stoltenberg, to campaign on his behalf.

Standing before the United Nations General Assembly last September, Trump told world leaders: “Everyone says I should get the Nobel Peace Prize”—before claiming credit for ending seven international conflicts and insisting that “no president or prime minister has ever done anything close to that.”

When the president didn’t win his coveted prize, he—in classic Trump fashion—threw a hissy fit and whined that he had been somehow slighted.

Trump’s actions, however, tell a different story.

In June 2025, less than 24 hours after posting a Truth Social list of reasons he deserved the Nobel—citing “stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo” and “keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia”—Trump authorized seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers to drop multiple “bunker buster” bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan.

He boasted afterwards that “a full payload of BOMBS” had been dropped on the primary site, Fordow.

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Pakistan, which had nominated Trump for the Nobel that very morning for brokering a ceasefire between Islamabad and New Delhi, was forced to condemn him hours later, calling the Iran strikes “a serious violation of international law.”

Venezuela came next—and with it, perhaps the starkest illustration of the gap between Trump’s peace brand and his military record.

Trump’s stated New Year’s resolution for 2026 was “peace on earth.” Forty-eight hours later, he ordered Operation Absolute Resolve—a Delta Force raid on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas that captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and flew them to Manhattan federal court on narcoterrorism charges.

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After the raid, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that Colombia could be next: “Colombia is very sick. Run by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. He’s not going to be doing it very long.” The administration has since named its new interventionist foreign policy the “Donroe Doctrine.”

Africa has been the least-publicized front, but arguably the most relentless. U.S. Africa Command conducted 126 airstrikes against al-Shabaab and ISIS-Somalia in 2025 alone—compared to just 10 for the entire previous year under Biden—before striking 16 ISIS targets in Nigeria’s Sokoto state on Christmas Day 2025.

Now, with Iranian nuclear sites in his crosshairs for the second time, Trump told the world on Saturday that U.S. forces were moving to “eliminate imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people,” in a video posted to Truth Social.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.

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Tom LatchemLead Global Correspondent

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