“I Never Guaranteed No War” - An Investigative Report

For fifteen months, in dozens of places, Donald Trump sold himself as the only president in decades who had not started a war. Now that he has led the country into war against Iran, he said yesterday on Meet the Press that he had never guaranteed or promised anything of the sort. A search for the record.

Donald Trump said two sentences on Meet the Press that contain the entire art of lying in concentrated form. First, he said, he never guaranteed no war. And otherwise, why would he have built the strongest military in the world? One has to read that twice because it contains the entire method. Whoever guaranteed nothing also did not lie when the opposite happens, and whoever builds an army apparently intended from the beginning that it be used. It becomes that simple when someone treats language as a tool rather than a promise and measures peace by the size of the weapons acquired in its name.

Against those sentences stands a compilation lasting two minutes and one second. It contains thirty timestamps, stretches from April 2023 into July 2024, and shows the same man in dozens of places making the same assurance. These are recordings of his own live appearances, each marked with place and date, each captured by a camera that forgets nothing.

On April 27, 2023, he declared that he had used his personality so that wars never had to be fought at all and mocked those who warned people not to vote for him. On February 23, 2024, at Winthrop Coliseum in South Carolina, came the line that would become liturgy. He had been the first president in decades not to start any new wars. No new wars. On March 2 he repeated it in Greensboro, on March 16 in Dayton, on April 2 in Wisconsin, always in the same words and always with the same gold lettering beneath his face.

On April 13 in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, he added the promise that he would drive the warmongers out of government, and on May 11 he renewed it in New Jersey with the same words. On May 1 in Waukesha, Wisconsin, he said that under him the country had never entered a war, that he had a tremendous record, that there had been prosperity. On May 23 in the Bronx, he spoke about terrible wars and all the people who had died in them.

On June 6, before Turning Point Action at Dream City Church, he mocked the warning that he would lead the country into war with an extended no, no. On June 18 in Racine, Wisconsin, he stated simply that he had not started a war, that he had been the only president who had not done so. On June 22 in Pennsylvania, he reversed the accusation and predicted that his opponents would end up in a war.

On June 28 in Virginia, the speech reached its sharpest tone. The others, he said, loved killing people, it was so wonderful for them, they liked war, they were the party of endless wars. Once again displayed beneath him in large letters was the slogan about there being no new wars. On July 20 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he promised that with his return everything would end because it had already ended once before. On July 24 in North Carolina, he summed it up by saying that with Donald Trump as president there had been no wars. And on July 28 in St. Cloud, Minnesota, he repeated in disbelief the question from his opponents whether of all people he would lead the country into war.

For fifteen months, then, war was the crime of others. He was the man of peace, and anyone who doubted him belonged among those who loved killing. Then on February 28 he led the country into war against Iran. On Meet the Press, broadcast on June 7 and recorded earlier in a barn near Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, while rain hammered the metal roof and he was expected shortly afterward for a roundtable with farmers, journalist Kristen Welker confronted him with that very promise. He had insisted there would be no new wars, she said. First of all, he replied, he had never guaranteed no war. You said it over and over again, she answered him, and that is exactly what the footage proves, not once but thirty times.

When nothing else came to mind, he told the journalist she was a major leftist, a major progressive. She answered that she was just a journalist. It is the old answer of the powerful that truth is treated as ideology and whoever speaks it becomes an opponent. Whoever asks questions is assigned to a camp so the answer no longer has to be given.

As a candidate, he continued, he had promised nothing. He did not like these endless wars, but this was not an endless war because after all they had only been doing it for three months. The same man who had called his opponents the party of endless wars now measures endlessness in months and concludes that three are not enough. He said he was doing the world and his own country a service because he had to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Elsewhere in the same interview he claimed that American strikes the previous year had already wiped out Iran’s nuclear facilities and did not notice that one statement cancels out the other. What was wiped out last year no longer needs a war to justify action this year. He also defended his withdrawal from the nuclear agreement Barack Obama had reached with Tehran without ever negotiating the better agreement he had promised in its place. Such things take years, he said.

As Welker continued pressing him on evidence and contradictions, he raised his voice, called her and the media dishonest, and spoke of the fake, dirty press. Then he declared the interview finished, removed the microphone, told her thank you my dear, have fun, stood up and left. It is the movement of a man who does not refute the truth but leaves the room in which it is being asked for.

It is not only his opponents who say he broke his word. Even from within his own camp, from advocates of America First, came the accusation that he had abandoned his promise of no new wars and moved away from his earlier line against military intervention. When even those who once believed in his commitment to peace withdraw their loyalty, the break can no longer be denied.

Abroad, too, criticism increased. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly accused the American government of entering the war without a convincing strategy and without a plan for ending it, which led to an open dispute with Trump. Oman’s foreign minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi went unusually far in diplomatic terms and stated in substance that the United States had lost control of its own foreign policy and had been drawn into a war, a serious misjudgment and a catastrophe. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called the course taken by Washington and Israel toward Iran a violation of international law and said conflicts cannot be solved with bombs. Spain also refused the offensive use of certain American bases. In Congress, representatives and senators demanded limits on the president’s war powers because he had acted militarily without obtaining their approval.

A promise binds the person who gives it. A guarantee is the language of a salesman, a slip of paper one presents or does not present. By turning a promise into a guarantee he now claims never to have signed, Trump transforms loyalty into a formality and himself into someone against whom nothing can be held. It is not a lie about the future but about the past, and it is the heaviest kind of lie because it demands that even the past adjust itself to present needs.

What stands in his way is the recording itself. People forget and forgive, they can be persuaded that what they heard meant something different. The device does not do that. It preserves the thirty days on which one man said the same thing and sets them against the single day on which he denied it. In an age in which every sentence instantly becomes an image, it is no longer conscience that binds the powerful to yesterday but the camera. Perhaps that is the real message of those two minutes. Not that this man lied, we already knew that, but that the truth about him is no longer preserved in any human being but in a file he cannot delete.

What remains is the one thing he accused others of and must now answer for himself. Behind the word war, which came so easily to his lips, stand the people who die in it, and no distinction between promising and guaranteeing protects them. They are the only thing in this story that cannot be rewritten afterward.