Trump says he's stopped eight wars. Here are ten he's started

If there is one thing that watching Donald Trump in the first year of his second term has taught me, it’s that he will claim anything at all to be true. The man lies as the rest of us breathe, so it’s impossible to believe a thing he says. Not that this stops him trying, selling his BS like the con artist he is.

My favorite Trump whopper has been his regular insistence that he has personally stopped eight wars — as he most recently claimed in his deranged text to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.

The chief message seemed to be that Trump was a man of peace until he was denied the Nobel Peace Prize, so now he’s a man of war, with his sights set on snatching Greenland from Denmark — not Norway, Don — by force if necessary.

Crazy Grandpa has had his itty-bitty feelings hurt, so he’s gonna show the world just how unfathomably ridiculous it was for him to think he could ever be seriously considered for an award honoring unity and diplomacy.

But back to “I stopped eight wars!” Trump seems to imagine that if he says it over and over, it will somehow become true. Except that, like everything else he utters, it’s nowhere near the realm of reality.

Here are the eight wars he supposedly stopped: Israel-Hamas (Gaza), Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Cambodia-Thailand, Egypt-Ethiopia, Serbia-Kosovo, Rwanda-Democratic Republic of Congo.

In all eight conflicts, Trump claims to have mediated/brokered ceasefires and peace agreements. In precisely none was lasting reconciliation achieved or, where tensions have reduced, was that ascribed solely or even mostly to his intervention.

Still, now that he’s officially proclaimed to have jumped off the peace train — “I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace” — because he was snubbed by the Nobel Committee, it might be instructive to look at ten wars he’s personally started, or intensified, since his return to power.

• The War on Trade: Never mind that Trump's trade policy is a consistently unpopular mess — he just can't stop threatening and levying tariffs on anyone and everyone he meets, friends and foes alike. The Supreme Court may be about to throw a spanner into Trump's works, in a case about who gets to levy tariffs. That won't stop Trump trying, anymore than serious economists’ advice might persuade him he hasn’t a clue what he’s doing.
  
• The War on Science: In tandem with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump has mercilessly attacked the most successful public health program in modern history, denouncing such proven miracles as the vaccines for smallpox, polio, hepatitis A, COVID, and flu. Operation Warp Speed has become Operation Warped Reasoning. The administration has routinely suppressed, downplayed, undermined, or simply ignored scientific research. They fight it because they don’t understand it. Their synapses can’t absorb it, so they assault it at every opportunity, lashing out like a trespassing rattlesnake.

• The War on Tylenol: Perhaps a sub-campaign to the War on Science. Poor Tylenol. All it has ever done is try to take away our aches and pains. Now, people with no medical training or expertise claim its chief ingredient, acetaminophen, causes autism when taken by pregnant women. No causal link has been found, but a delusional 79-year-old man and an aide who looks as if he just survived a grenade blast and sounds like he swallowed glass beg to differ.

• The War on the Environment:Trump’s bombardment of environmental policy has decimated protections for land, oceans, forests, and wildlife and worsened the climate crisis. It’s brought near irreversible destruction. But the future has little use for Trump because he can’t buy it, sell it, or use it as a bargaining chip.

• The War on Common Sense: It follows a general pattern. Everything Trump says is gospel. Everything the other side says is lunacy, designed to rip apart your life. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

• The War on Knowledge: Shaking down universities and starving public schools of funding is a calculated strategy designed to chill free speech and academic excellence. The idea it’s a response to antisemitism on campuses in a canard, and a transparent one at that.

• The War on Race: It started with dismantling DEI and affirmative action and escalated to combat so-called “woke” culture. But over the past several months, Trump hasn’t even bothered to disguise the fact he’s targeting Black and Brown America, and really anyone non-White Christian. It is racism without apology.

• The War on Mainstream Media: It pretty much goes without saying that anyone with authoritarian aspirations can’t tolerate a press that doesn’t fawn all over him. All must be brought to heel. Among the mainstream networks, CBS is now in Trump’s pocket. One down.

• The War on Joy: At his core, Trump is the unhappiest man we will ever have the misfortune to try in vain to understand. He hates seeing people happy. He thrives on hostility, misery, discontent. It’s his fuel. He doesn’t know what to do with delight, so he fights it with every fiber of his being. This explains his opposition to anything smacking of harmony.

• The War on Everyone who Disagrees with Trump: This is really what it comes down to. It’s behind the ICE attacks in Minneapolis and everywhere in blue America. The man is so monumentally insecure that he can’t handle any opposition at all. This is why the travesty of ICE no longer has much to do with undocumented immigrants, if it ever did.

These are merely the wars Trump has started inside our own borders. Outside them, he’s about to spark a real one in Greenland, simply because like all toddlers who have always gotten their way, no one can tell him no. It really is that stark.

Someone must stop this madness. Now.

• Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.