President Donald Trump’s critics are having a field day. He promised peace, they insist, and now he has brought war. The indictment is delivered with particular relish by those who have long despised him, and it arrives accompanied by a full dossier of his own words.

The New York Times’s Ezra Klein assembled the prosecution exhibit: Trump declared, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” and “I’m going to be the one that keeps you out of war.” His colleague Peter Baker cataloged more: In 2016, Trump had denounced military adventurism and regime change as a “proven, absolute failure,” and that in 2024 he was still boasting of starting “no new wars.”