It’s August 18, 2025, and Bill Maher is saying something ignorant. This is often the case, but today’s rant is a special one. “This would be the good in Donald Trump: he really does not like war,” Maher tells his guest. From Pakistan to Rwanda, he claims, the president has been intervening on the side of peace. “[…]I’m not coming around, I’m not on anybody’s team. I’m on what’s right, what’s true, what happened. This is what happened. He just doesn’t like war.”

Now it’s March 2026, and the United States and Israel have carpeted Iran with deadly airstrikes. In the city of Minab, their missiles struck a girls’ school near a military base, killing at least 153 of its students; in footage of the aftermath, “screams can be heard in the background” as “schoolbags and textbooks are being pulled from the debris.” In Sanandaj, Al Jazeera reports that “U.S. and Israeli forces dropped six missiles on different parts of the city, including densely populated neighbourhoods.” They also bombed the compound of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, killing him along with several of his lieutenants. This was the assassination of a head of state, carried out using CIA intelligence, against a nation which has not attacked the United States. Under international law, it’s one of the most serious war crimes a nation can commit. On Truth Social, Trump boasted about it: “there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do.” And on March 2, Trump went further and threatened a ground invasion of Iran, saying that “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.”

But remember, Donald Trump doesn’t like war.

The myth of “Donald the Dove,” a phrase New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd coined in 2016, is a core part of Trump’s political appeal. It pops up again each time he runs for president, and it has fooled a lot of people who ought to know better. In 2016, Trump positioned himself as a departure from the GOP of George W. Bush, saying in televised debates that the invasion of Iraq had been a “big, fat mistake.” He promised that “war and aggression will not be my first instinct,” since “a superpower understands that caution and restraint are really truly signs of strength.” Even then, it was all talk: in fact, Trump had supported the invasion of Iraq, calling it “a tremendous success from a military standpoint” in 2003, and he mixed his rhetoric about “caution and restraint” with lurid fantasies about shooting Islamic militants with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood. But at that point, he had no actual record in government, and compared to “Hillary the Hawk,” who really was a bloodthirsty aggressor against Libya and other nations, it was at least plausible to consider him a lesser evil.

His first term in office, though, should have permanently killed the idea of Trump being “anti-war.” It’s technically true, as his supporters like to say, that he didn’t start any new wars. But he didn’t pull out of Afghanistan, either—in fact, he dropped the “mother of all bombs,” the United States’ largest non-nuclear explosive, on it. In the years 2017-2020, not a single overseas military base was closed. Pentagon budgets were expanded, not reduced. Trump also carried out more drone strikes than Barack Obama, illegally assassinated General Qasem Soleimani of Iran, proposed using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, aided Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen (and vetoed bipartisan legislation against it), and as John Bolton’s memoir revealed in 2020, he repeatedly urged members of his administration to consider invading Venezuela. Oh, and then there was his bizarre plan to “bomb the drugs” in Mexico, or the way he pandered to Benjamin Netanyahu’s most extreme demands on Palestine, indirectly setting the stage for October 7. After all that, anyone who was paying even a little attention should have realized Trump was a warmonger, the same as every U.S. president who went before him. It was obvious.

But not obvious enough, apparently, for some people. When Trump returned for a rematch against Joe Biden (and then Kamala Harris) in 2024, he once again framed himself as “the candidate of peace”—and believe it or not, political commentators bought it. There was podcaster Jimmy Dore, who said that Trump “went rogue and said we shouldn’t do those wars in the Middle East,” and had been targeted for impeachment for that reason. There was Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon, who declared herself a “MAGA Lefty” in March 2025 because, among other things, she believed Trump was “anti-war.” In outlets like Compact and the Telegraph, Christian Parenti wrote multiple articles on this theme, saying in 2023 that “Trump’s Real Crime Is Opposing Empire” and in 2024 that “Trump will end the American empire for good.” Even Glenn Greenwald went on Fox News in October 2024 and praised Trump for his rhetoric about ending wars, saying that “I don’t think it’s a political strategy that much for Donald Trump, I think it’s his instinct.”

More recently, Greenwald has posted an incredulous video to YouTube with the title “Donald Trump ran on an anti-war platform. What happened?!” Speaking shortly after Trump abducted Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, Greenwald is visibly outraged: “Supposedly, our U.S. military was only going to be used to defend our country, defend our homeland, only attack people who had threatened to attack the United States, or had attacked the United States. Maduro poses no threat of any kind to the United States, that’s obvious.” He’s right about that: Maduro posed no threat, but Trump attacked him anyway. Elsewhere, Unherd editor Sohrab Ahmari has been experiencing a similar whiplash, first writing in 2023 that “Donald J. Trump was the most antiwar, anti-imperial U.S. president in two generations,” but now admitting that “the second Trump administration has now launched interventions in no fewer than seven countries.” “Somehow,” he writes, “Vice President JD Vance, a fierce Trumpian critic of the neoconservatives, ended up in government at the highest levels, only to help implement the foreign-policy preferences of, say, John Bolton or Elliott Abrams.” He concludes that Vance had good intentions, but simply “lost the foreign policy war” to Marco Rubio and other pernicious forces. 

Really? How can otherwise intelligent people be this gullible? Do they line up for the wallet inspector, too? The real answer to “What happened?!” is much simpler: there was never any “anti-war” Trumpism. The world’s most prolific and flagrant liar just told a lie. So did JD Vance, a notoriously slippery opportunist who was telling his friends that Trump might be “America’s Hitler” in 2016, only to become his loyal errand-boy a few years later. Vance’s whole M.O. is to adopt whatever view will benefit him in the moment, because the only thing he really believes in is his own advancement. He knew war is unpopular, so he talked a big game about opposing it and being “America First” in order to get people’s support, the same way he talked a big game about disliking Trump to get what he wanted from liberals in the Hillbilly Elegy era. Trump himself did the same. The whole thing has always been a scam, and it’s amazing that anyone fell for it.

There are, of course, those who didn’t. During the last election, Mehdi Hasan put out a five-minute video debunking the idea of the “anti-war” Trump, and paid particular attention to Yemen, which is all too often ignored in these discussions. And here at Current Affairs, Elias Khoury wrote a full article debunking several of Parenti’s points in 2023. But the point here is not to say “we told you so” (though we did). It’s to figure out how this particular form of propaganda took root, so the same outcomes can be avoided in the future.