Every week in this newsletter, I answer your questions about American politics. But rarely have I heard from so many readers asking the same question:
Q: Has Trump really been involved in ending six wars?
Q: What are the 6 wars Trump is talking about???
Q: Trump says he has ended six wars. So wanted a member of the press to ask, so tell us which six. They didn’t. Do you know and can you separate fact from fiction on this?
Q: What are the 6 wars that Trump stopped and what exactly did he do?
And that’s just a sample! There were plenty more of you who have been wondering this. So I knew I’d better dig into it.
For those unfamiliar, these questions stem from a claim President Trump has been making a lot recently: “I’ve solved six wars in the last six months,” he says. (“I’m averaging about a war a month,” he added in July. Not bad!)
Then, this week on “Fox and Friends,” the count went up! “We ended seven wars,” he claimed.
As always at Wake Up To Politics, we try to take a cold look at the facts, without fear or favor. In today’s Q&A column, I’ll break down each of the conflicts Trump is referring to, and examine whether it’s correct to say he ended them. As always with the weekly Q&A columns, the full thing will be available to paid subscribers — as will the full video of me explaining this above for those who want to watch!
Helpfully, White House spokesman Harrison Fields listed out the six conflicts in an X post this week. So, there’s Part 1 of the question. Part 2: Did Trump really end them? I’ll take them in this order (and then we’ll get to the mystery seventh conflict at the end).
Israel / Iran
Israel launched an attack against Iranian military facilities in June, setting off almost two weeks of hostilities that killed more than 1,000 Iranians and 32 Israelis (according to each country) and wounded thousands on each side.
President Trump would later name the conflict the “12 Day War,” in a Truth Social post that announced a U.S.-mediated ceasefire. According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump helped initiate the ceasefire talks in coordination with Qatar, and later cajoled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into complying with the terms of the agreement.
“BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” Trump wrote in a post aimed at Netanyahu, who had been planning to continue bombing Iran after accusing Tehran of breaking the ceasefire. Heeding Trump, Netanyahu turned his planes around. Since then, the truce has held.
There’s one more factor to consider, though: It’s true that President Trump played a role in ending the conflict — but he didn’t do so purely peacefully. A 30,000-pound reason Iran came to the negotiating table was the fact that the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, joining the war on Israel’s side. Reasonable people can disagree whether or not that was the correct call as a matter of policy, but in terms of grading whether Trump is a “president of peace,” it does seem like a relevant detail.
My verdict: True, but lacks context. This was a war that President Trump helped end. But, before he did that, he also played a pretty big role exacerbating it.
