President Donald Trump is dismissing the idea that launching the war with Iran this year betrayed his refrain of “No new wars” that he made repeatedly as he campaigned again for the White House.
Trump, in an interview that aired Sunday on NBC's “Meet the Press,” said he “didn't guarantee” there would be no wars if he were back in office.
"First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?" Trump said.
Trump also defended plans for a now-scrapped $1.8 billion fund that would have compensated allies of the Republican president and he repeated his baseless claims of mass fraud in California’s drawn-out vote count from Tuesday’s primary. He ended the interview abruptly when he became frustrated with pushback from NBC's Kristen Welker.
Iran ‘is not an endless war’
In his 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly cast his Democratic opponents as warmongers and said he was a president who started “no new wars" and would bring an era of peace.
But Trump said in the NBC interview, taped Friday in Wisconsin, that as a candidate, “I didn’t promise anything.”
“I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months,” he said of the war with Iran, which began Feb. 28.
Trump said he was “doing the world a service” and “doing our country a service” because he had to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon. But elsewhere in the interview, Trump repeated a contradictory message where he said U.S. strikes last year “obliterated” Iranian nuclear sites.
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He also defended his decision in his first term to withdraw from Democratic President Barack Obama's nuclear deal with Iran, an agreement he has heavily criticized, without negotiating the “better deal” he has promised to reach.
“It takes years to do these things,” Trump said.
