By Ben Norton – Jan 25, 2o26
Self-declared “peacemaker” Donald Trump has bombed 10 countries, more than any other US leader. Now he plans to raise the military budget to $1.5 trillion — nearly the rest of the world’s defense spending combined.
Donald Trump claims to be a so-called “peace president”, but he has bombed more countries than any other US leader.
After proudly renaming the Pentagon from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, Trump now plans to raise the US military budget from $1 trillion to a staggering $1.5 trillion.
This means that, if Trump succeeds, the United States will soon spend more on its military than all of the other countries in the world combined, excluding China.
This is deeply hypocritical, because in his January 2025 inauguration speech, as he started his second term as US president, Trump declared that he would be a “peacemaker”.
Similarly, in the victory speech that Trump gave after he won the November 2024 presidential election, he claimed, falsely, that during his first term, “we had no wars”.
“I’m not going to start a war; I’m going to stop wars”, Trump promised.
He lied. In the first year of his second term, the Trump administration bombed seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
When his first and second terms are combined, Trump has bombed 10 nations (the aforementioned seven, plus Afghanistan, Libya, and Pakistan).
This means Trump has bombed more countries than all other presidents in US history.
Moreover, Trump is threatening to attack at least four more nations: Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Greenland. He has vowed to colonize Greenland and forcibly turn it into US territory.
In a publication on his website Truth Social on January 20, 2026, Trump posted a photoshopped image of himself sitting in the White House next to a map showing Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela all annexed by the US empire.
Bipartisan US wars kill millions of people
Trump is certainly not unique when it comes to waging wars; every US president in modern history has intervened abroad and overseen war crimes.
George W. Bush bombed five countries, and invaded Iraq in an illegal war of aggression.
Barack Obama won the so-called Nobel “Peace” Prize, before his administration went on to bomb seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.
Trump bombed the same seven nations attacked by Obama, adding three more: Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela.
In fact, the wars waged by the US in the two decades after September 11, 2001 had a death toll of at least 4.5 million people, in a conservative estimate by researchers at the elite Brown University.
They also found that 38 million people were displaced due to these US-fueled wars. This was the largest refugee crisis since World War Two.
These imperial wars have been bipartisan. All modern US presidents have been complicit.
But what is especially hypocritical about Trump is that his administration constantly spreads propaganda claiming that the man who has bombed more countries than any other US leader is “the peace president”.
Trump launched more airstrikes in 6 months than Biden did in 4 years
Just in 2025, in the first 11 months of his second term, Trump carried out more than 500 bombings of countries around the world, according to data from the monitoring group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED).
“Trump launched more airstrikes on foreign nations in the first six months of his second term than Biden did in all four years he was in office”, CBC reported, citing ACLED figures.
Joe Biden himself also oversaw extreme war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Biden administration strongly supported the Israeli regime, giving it tens of billions of dollars of military aid and shielding it from any legal consequences by repeatedly vetoing resolutions at the UN Security Council, as US-backed Israeli forces committed genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Trump has continued doing the same. In September, the Trump administration pressured Congress to approve the sale of $6.4 billion more in military equipment to help Israel further colonize Palestinian land.
Trump bombed civilian sites in Venezuela
Moreover, when Trump attacked Venezuela and kidnapped its internationally recognized President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, he also killed more than 100 people, including civilians.
In the illegal invasion of Venezuelan sovereign territory, the US military bombed civilian sites in addition to military targets.
Among the civilian areas hit by the US military was a medical warehouse that stored supplies for Venezuelan dialysis patients. Thousands of civilians could now die, because they lost access to this life-saving treatment.
The US military similarly destroyed an important scientific research center in Venezuela.
Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth proudly declared that the US attack on Venezuela was aimed at China and Russia.
“We’re re-establishing deterrence that’s so absolute and so unquestioned that our enemies will not dare to test us”, he stated.
Trump wants $1.5 trillion US military budget
Just a few days after Trump bombed Venezuela, he announced that he plans to increase the US military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion by 2027.
Fortune magazine reported that “a $1.5 trillion U.S. military budget would exceed the combined military expenditures of the next 35 highest-spending countries. And starting from the bottom up, a $1.5 trillion U.S. military budget would exceed the military expenditures of every other nation combined except for China”.
For context, in 2024, the entire world’s military expenditure was $2.7 trillion.
As of that year, the United States alone accounted for 37% of global military spending, according to data collected by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
Nearly half, 47%, of US federal government discretionary spending was dedicated to the Pentagon — which was previously known as the Department of Defense, but which self-declared “peacemaker” Trump renamed the Department of War.
In 2024, the US spent more on its military than the next nine largest military spenders in the world combined.
The combined defense expenditure of China, Russia, Germany, India, the UK, Saudi Arabia, Ukraine, France, and Japan was $984 billion, compared to $997 billion in the US (and most of these top military spenders are US allies).
China’s defense spending in 2024 was $314 billion, or less than one-third of that of the US, according to SIPRI.
China has not fought a war since 1979, while the United States bombed seven countries just in 2025.
Trump’s $1.5 trillion US military budget will increase federal debt by $5.8 trillion
When he announced his intention to raise the military budget to $1.5 trillion, Trump claimed he will, “at the same time, pay down Debt”.
This is false.
A report by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that Trump boosting annual military expenditure to $1.5 trillion will add $5.8 trillion to US federal debt over the next decade.
Trump claimed that the tariff revenue that the US government makes will supposedly cover this increase in military spending. This is not true.
Tariff revenue is estimated to be around $300 billion per year, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. That is significantly smaller than the additional cost of increasing the military budget to $1.5 trillion.
This assumption that tariff revenue will stay high, at roughly $300 billion annually throughout the next decade, likewise suggests that Trump’s assertion that his tariffs will reindustrialize the US is false.
If Trump’s levies truly aimed to accomplish this, it would be expected that tariff revenue would fall over time, as they would reduce imports and instead encourage domestic consumption of goods.
Nevertheless, Trump’s insistence that his tariffs could help pay off US federal debt demonstrate that he knows they will not re-industrialize the US.
Trump cuts taxes on the rich while raising taxes on the poor
In reality, Trump’s tariffs are a regressive tax on Americans. They represent a shift of the tax burden off of rich Americans onto poorer ones.
Trump constantly claims that other countries will supposedly pay for his tariffs. This is not true. It is US importers and consumers that pay the tariffs.
This tax on consumption of imported goods is extremely regressive. The biggest burden by far is felt by lower-income Americans, who spend much more of their paycheck on basic imported goods.
At least 55% of the cost of Trump’s tariffs have been paid by US consumers, Goldman Sachs estimated in October 2025.
Meanwhile, Trump has been cutting taxes on the richest Americans. The policies included in his “One Big Beautiful Bill” will overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest people in the country.
Trump’s policies will result in 69% of tax cuts going to the richest 20% of Americans.
While a mere 1% of tax cuts will benefit the poorest 20% of Americans, 94% of Trump’s tax cuts will go to the richest 60%.
69% of the tax cuts in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” go to the richest 20% of Americans. Just 6% go to the poorest 40%.
In fact, due to Trump’s tariffs, the bottom 95% of Americans will actually see an effective tax increase.
The poorer a person is, the higher the percentage of their income will go to paying taxes to the Trump administration, while only the richest 5% of Americans will actually see their taxes fall.
This is because, as Trump reduced progressive income taxation in one area, he increased regressive taxation in another area, in the form of tariffs.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculated that Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and his tax cuts on the rich will cause US federal debt to balloon by $5.5 trillion by 2034. This is in addition to the $5.8 trillion federal debt increase that will result from his $1.5 trillion military budget.
This is all profoundly hypocritical, because Trump oversaw the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which he appointed the world’s richest billionaire oligarch, top US government contractor Elon Musk, to lead.
Trump and Musk claimed DOGE would root out government “waste, fraud, and abuse”.
In reality, the Trump administration gutted social spending and the parts of the state that actually help working families, while not reducing spending overall.
Trump’s plans to increase US federal debt by trillions — by cutting taxes on the rich and raising the military budget to $1.5 trillion to wage war around the world — come at the same time when he is eliminating $186 billion of funding for SNAP, the food program that helps poor and working-class Americans feed their families.
In other words, Trump is slashing government support for the poorest people in the country, while providing tax relief for the richest and massively increasing the Pentagon budget, which will further enrich corporate shareholders in the military-industrial complex.
Donald Trump, the billionaire self-declared “peacemaker” who now holds the record for bombing more countries that any other US president, is demonstrating to the world that all US wars are indeed a form of class war.
Ben Norton
Benjamin Norton is the founder and editor of the independent news website Multipolarista, where he does original reporting in both English and Spanish. Benjamin has reported from numerous countries, including Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia, and more. His journalistic work has been published in dozens of media outlets, and he has done interviews on Sky News, Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, El Financiero Bloomberg, Al Mayadeen teleSUR, RT, TRT World, CGTN, Press TV, HispanTV, Sin Censura, and various TV channels in Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Benjamin writes a regular column for Al Mayadeen (in English and Spanish). He was formerly a reporter with the investigative journalism website The Grayzone, and previously produced the political podcast and video show Moderate Rebels. His personal website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
