April 3, 2026
By Jacob Collins Dodd
Staff Writer
After winning his second presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024, Donald Trump told his supporters during his election night victory speech, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.” Just over a year after his inauguration, on Feb. 28, the United States, alongside Israel, started a war with Iran.
Being an antiwar candidate was one of Trump’s most prominent and repeated political positions, reinforced by his top advisers and echoed across rallies and interviews.
At a campaign rally in State College, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 26, 2024, Trump asserted that if his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, won the election, she would drag the country into war.
“She would get us into World War III, guaranteed,” Trump said, adding that Harris would send the “sons and daughters” of Americans “to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.”
In 2012, on Twitter, now called X, Trump said multiple times that then-president Barack Obama would recklessly start a military conflict with Iran to distract from what Trump suggested were his faults as a leader. In 2013, Trump doubled down on these claims, saying that Obama would orchestrate a war there to cover up his failures as a president.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIAH ALLEN
Obama’s administration never initiated a war or any military actions with Iran. In 2015, the Obama administration did, however, sign a nuclear deal with Iran, preventing it from quickly accessing nuclear weapons and dismantling a large part of the country’s nuclear infrastructure.
In 2018, when Trump was serving his first term as president, he withdrew from this deal, in a decision that was widely regarded as irresponsible at a time when tensions between the United States and Iran were already fragile.
Major sectors of global markets are now in a dangerous decline, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the New York Stock Exchange.
Since the Israel-Gaza conflict started in 2023, Trump has repeatedly promised to resolve it. During a White House press conference with Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 4, 2025, Trump said, “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip,” referring to Palestinian land. That same year, the United Nations found consistent evidence that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Within the first year of his reelection, Trump ordered military strikes on seven countries — Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen and, most recently, Iran — all without formal authorization from Congress.
The Iranian government has long been documented as an authoritarian regime. In January, Iranian government forces were linked to the deaths of an estimated 30,000 civilian protesters.
But when Trump announced that the United States was starting “major combat operations in Iran” in a video on Truth Social, he said the country’s regime posed a threat to America’s national security — despite the Defense Intelligence Agency’s comprehensive assessment in May 2025 that found it would take Iran over a decade to acquire the resources needed to produce an impactful missile.
Since the war started, it has cost American taxpayers about $1 billion a day, according to Yahoo Finance. Top policy analysts estimate that the war will ultimately cost trillions of American taxpayer dollars. On March 19, the Trump administration requested $200 billion in additional funds from Congress to fund the United States’ list of war expenses. As of April 3, Congress had not approved the request.
On March 27, nationwide gas prices averaged $3.98 per gallon, 34% higher than the $2.98 average on Feb. 27, the day before the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Diesel prices have risen significantly as well, going from $3.76 to $5.38 per gallon within a month.
Major sectors of global markets are now in a dangerous decline, including the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the New York Stock Exchange. This is particularly due to rising fuel prices and spotty geopolitical tensions stemming from the war.
As of March 21, the war had resulted in 3,230 deaths, including at least 210 children. On the first day of the United States’ attacks, the U.S. government killed over 170 people, mostly children, in a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, as a result of a mass strike that destroyed 12 surrounding structures. Multiple investigations — including one from The New York Times — found that the United States used outdated, unreliable intelligence for the combat operation. At least 13 American service members had been killed in the war.
For years, Trump has warned Americans about leaders who would drag the country into war. He made the promise of no wars a central part of his campaign, repeating it at rallies and across interviews and social media. This was a lie, and now, the United States is mired in an expensive, multi-country war with no exit strategy.
