This past Jan. 15 — ironically, on the actual birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. — the 2025 Nobel laureate for peace, Maria Corina Machado, took her prize medal, encased in a gold (of course) and glass frame, to the White House to present it to our president.
Beneath the medal, Machado had inscribed these words: “Presented as a Personal Symbol of Gratitude on behalf of the Venezuelan People in Recognition of President Trump’s Principled and Decisive Action to Secure a Free Venezuela. The Courage of America and its President Donald J. Trump will Never be Forgotten by the Venezuelan People.”
Andrew Manis
While our “peacemaker-in-chief” was no doubt gladdened by Machado’s unprecedented gesture, he still sounded a bit pouty by claiming he “put out eight wars; in theory, you should get (a Nobel Peace Prize) for each war.” He boasted he had “saved millions and millions of lives.”
These are the eight “wars” he takes credit for ending: Israel-Hamas, Israel-Iran, India-Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo-Rwanda, Armenia-Azerbaijan, Cambodia-Thailand, Serbia-Kosovo and Egypt-Ethiopia. On the one hand, they all marked short-lived ceasefires or border skirmishes rather than the end of formal wars. On the other hand, they are places where tensions persist and conflict continues.
Bottom line regarding all the faux endings to these wars: Trump is as entitled to claim Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize as he is to take credit for walking on the moon long before Neil Armstrong did.
Has anyone noticed how much peace has broken out in the United States ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator onto the stage of American politics?
Closer to home, has anyone noticed how much peace has broken out in the United States ever since Donald Trump descended that golden escalator onto the stage of American politics?
Although just the tip of a a very large ICEberg, consider this abbreviated list:
In his first “presidential” campaign speech, he launched his first anti-immigration salvo: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best …. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Since Trump entered politics, a 2020 report from the FBI revealed hate crimes increased by just under 20 percent in America.
According to CNN (Jan. 26, 2026), the Obama years — 2009-2016 — saw 213 mass shootings at schools, churches or shopping areas, for an average of 26.6 shootings per year. Since Trump — 2017-2025 — the total number has risen to 556, for an average of 61.8 per year.
President Donald Trump kisses Erika Kirk at the conclusion of a memorial for her husband, conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Sunday, Sept. 21, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
At Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, Trump contrasted his approach to campaigning to that of Kirk, himself no saint in the political arena: “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them …. Maybe they can convince me that that’s not right, but I can’t stand my opponent.”
Since Trump’s entry into politics, instances of school bullying and antisemitic attacks have risen precipitously. These included the mass shootings in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and in a Walmart supermarket in El Paso, conducted by white supremacists who embraced racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theories popular in their circles.
As to instances of bullying, just after Trump’s 2024 election victory, an elementary school teacher in Georgia reported: “This is my 21st year of teaching. This is the first time I’ve had a student call another student the N-word.”
In 2022, a deranged attacker broke into the San Francisco home of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Finding her husband at home, he asked, “Where’s Nancy?” Learning she was in Washington, D.C., he began assaulting Paul Pelosi, beating him with a hammer and fracturing his skull. Several days later, a number of Republicans, including the president, made light of the attack.
The president’s official coin commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution bears the face of Trump on one side and on the other the post-assassination-attempt image of a bloodied but defiant Trump admonishing his fellow Americans to “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
He urged his followers to punch protesters in the mouth, promising to pay their lawyers’ fees.
During his 2016 campaign rallies, he urged his followers to punch protesters in the mouth, promising to pay their lawyers’ fees.
In his first term, he wondered why the United States could not get more migrants from, say, Norway instead of from “shithole countries” in Africa or elsewhere.
In 2018, his first off-year election, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and became known as “The Squad.” On July 14, 2019, Trump publicly advised them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done.”
California Rep. Adam Schiff led the attempt(s) to impeach Trump, one of whose followers left Schiff a warning in the congressman’s voice mailbox: “I’m gonna f-ing blow your brains out.”
As his first term was ending, Trump encouraged 2,500 of his closest friends to march on Congress and “fight like hell” on Jan. 6, 2021. Later, very early in his second term, he pardoned them and awarded some of them the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When informed the “patriots” had hung a noose from makeshift gallows on Capitol grounds to “hang Mike Pence,” as the chant admonished, Trump, the defender of evangelical Christians, replied, “So what?”
A gallows erected outside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by supporters of Donald Trump. (Photo by Tyler Merbler via Flickr; used by Creative Commons licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)
In 2024, all through his second campaign for the presidency, he centered his message on anti-immigration, frequently referring to immigrants as “not even human. They’re animals.” He warned these newcomers would increase crime in the streets and, in a quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, “poison the bloodstream” of America.
All the while, America’s megalomaniacal monster waved an imaginary Christian flag and promised to fight for it. That is one reason evangelicals were less than enthusiastic about a potential Pence presidency. As sociologists of religion Phillip Gorski and Samuel Perry explained, “The fight was more important than the faith. … Pence had the faith, but Trump had the fight. And the fight was really all they cared about.”
All of which has brought us through several weeks of clashes between masked ICE agents and American citizens exercising their First Amendment right of free speech to protest Trump’s dragnet of blue states. There, Trump’s stormtroopers have searched and destroyed black and brown families — some undocumented, some documented, some American citizens — and have brought the nation to the boiling point.
In the late 1960s, waves upon waves of protesters managed to help end the Vietnam War. Nonviolent protests have worked in the past.
Nowadays, we have no Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young lamenting “four dead in Ohio.” But we do have a president who makes Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout. And we have Bruce Springsteen:
King Trump’s private army from the DHS
Guns belted to their coats
Came to Minneapolis to enforce the law
Or so their story goes
Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringing through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26….
Now they say they’re here to uphold the law
But they trample on our rights
If your skin is black or brown, my friend,
You can be questioned or deported on sight ….
Oh, our Minneapolis, I hear your voice
Singing through the bloody mist
Here in our home, they killed and roamed
In the winter of ’26
We’ll take our stand for this land
And the stranger in our midst
We’ll remember the names of those who died
On the streets of Minneapolis …
Peace, it would seem, is not what it’s cracked up to be. In Trumplandia, it appears P-E-A-C-E spells M-U-R-D-E-R.
But where are our patriots — progressive patriots 5-, 8-, 10-million strong — called to the nation’s capital, like the “patriots” of Jan. 6, willing to take our stand and storm the White House?
Where are those of us willing to march and, if necessary, spill our own blood, chanting, “Hey, hey, Donald J, how many protesters did you kill today?” until “We the People” come face to face with Mr. Trump, call on Congress to invoke the 25th Amendment and tell them all: “No More Kings!”?
Andrew M. Manis earned a Ph.D. in American religious history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and is retired professor of history at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Ga. He also is author of A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
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