At the beginning of 2026, President Donald Trump said that his New Year’s resolution was to accomplish “peace on earth.” As he asserted last year with his aggressive campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize, and the White House dubbing him “THE PEACE PRESIDENT” on X, Trump was convinced that he would be the one to fulfill it with “no new wars.” But just two days after issuing this resolution, Trump had Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro kidnapped.
It is a pattern that has continued deep into 2026—promises of “peace” followed by bloodshed and violence. In January, Trump announced the Board of Peace, an international effort to “stop generations of hatred and bloodshed.” A month later, a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike hit an Iranian all-girls elementary school as a result of outdated intel, killing at least 168 people, most of whom were children.
On April 7, Trump threatened the people of Iran if the government refused to reopen the contested Strait of Hormuz, a trade route through which about 20% of the world’s oil passes. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump threatened on his social media platform. This threat followed a White House Easter celebration where Trump spoke about the war to a group of children who had gathered to hunt for eggs.
Perhaps this was what Trump meant all along by “peace.” Trump’s peace is one secured through bloodshed. Trump is no prince of peace but a herald of war, profiteering off of what critics like defense analyst William Hartung have labeled the “military-industrial complex.” Another vocal critic—Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.)—has accused Trump and those close to him of “profiting off war and death.”
Days before the bombs were dropped on the all-girls elementary school, Trump hosted the CEOs of the U.S.’ largest defense companies at the White House, where they agreed to quadruple production of what Trump has called “exquisite class” weaponry. Soon after the bombing of Iran, major U.S. weapons manufacturers hit record highs in the stock market. Trump later sent multiple fundraising emails to supporters, casting Democrats as weak and, according to the conservative media outlet The Dispatch, using the Iran war to “stockpile campaign cash” for his own political operation.
The machinery of the military-industrial complex is seamless: War generates contracts, contracts generate profit, and profit funds the political operation that authorizes the next war. This is not a system that wages war reluctantly. It is a system in which, as U.N. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned in her 2025 report, corporations are “no longer merely implicated” but “embedded” in an economy of war and genocide. While Albanese’s report is specifically about Israel’s abuse of Palestinians and how corporations are profiting from the genocide in Gaza, there is evidence that corporations are looking to expand their profiteering from death to other parts of the world.
Sean Manning, a Herbert Scoville Jr. Peace Fellow, wrote for The Equation in March that the Trump administration’s official budget, which includes $1.5 trillion for defense, “could give unparalleled increases in financial power to defense contractors and support for the political work they already do to influence Congress.” “In 10 years,” writes Manning, “the largest increase in discretionary spending in modern U.S. history could very well be regarded as the largest corporate welfare plan for defense contractors and arms salesmen[.]”
In a story originally published at Lever in March, journalist Veronica Riccobene reported that the defense industry has become increasingly ingratiated with the U.S. government. “The weapons industry has become incredibly concentrated,” Riccobene notes. “Since the 1990s, the number of ‘prime’ contractors working with the Defense Department has shrunk from 51 to 5. And in recent years, these giants — propped up by trillions in taxpayer spending — have spent more enriching investors than in expanding production.” As Riccobene noted, following the strikes in Iran, those contractors supplying the Pentagon with weapons saw an immediate return. That defense contractors are seeing an increase in the U.S. government’s demand for weaponry—and therefore an increase in their bottom line—makes sense.
As such, Trump has become the merchant of death.
Trump has become the merchant of death.
Without war, there can be no industry to profit from. “Peace,” in this regard, is a means to an end—language that legitimizes an industry that has profited immeasurably from the pulverizing of bodies and lands. The “peace” Trump is determined to protect relies on putting billionaires at ease and assuring them that their pockets will remain full. As Hartung shows, the status quo of a military-industrial complex seeks to translate bombs into assets and uses the language of peacekeeping to whitewash and sanitize its mission.
READ MORE: Trump Threatens Iran: ‘A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight’
The true objectives of “THE PEACE PRESIDENT” are glaring in the White House statement released this past February: “Through bold actions rooted in Peace Through Strength, President Trump has ended conflicts, dismantled threats, and rebuilt U.S. military dominance, making the world safer for Americans and restoring respect for the United States on the global stage.” And tragically, this may be the only kind of “peace” that one of Trump’s most powerful bloc of supporters—white evangelicals in the U.S.—have been taught to accept.
According to some of these loyal supporters, Trump’s warmongering is part of a greater divine mission to usher in the “end times,” fulfilling what critics have described as a Christian nationalist fantasy in which eternal peace can be achieved only at American hands and through warfare. In this setting, Trump’s use of “peace” is an eschatological dog whistle; “peace” is a common and important word within white evangelical end times theology that tethers Trump’s wealth-building militarism to a Christian nationalist future.
For white evangelical Trump supporters, it is only through such violence that end times prophecy can be fulfilled—a time when God will “wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” (Revelation 21:4). Right-wing pastor and Ohio county commissioner Drenda Keesee recently explained that the bombing of Iran is a divine sign that “we are on the precipice” of Armageddon. In March, megachurch pastor Jack Hibbs applauded the strikes, claiming that Trump is a president “for such a time as this” and that he is “being led by God.” For them, eternal peace can only be achieved through the wars Trump wages, and so they sanctify the violence, regardless of how many innocents are killed in the process. If bloodshed is the cost of Christ’s eternal reign, so be it.
Yet there are many Christians across the world who have a radically different understanding of peace. Latin American Christians, especially those who have suffered under and survived various military dictatorships, know what it feels like to be suppressed by militarism in their own homelands. The late Catholic priest and theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, considered a founder of liberation theology, understood that Christ’s reign is not one established through bombings or military violence. Rather, Gutiérrez writes in A Theology of Liberation that Christ calls us toward “the denunciation of injustice [which] implies the rejection of the use of Christianity to legitimize the established order.”
For Gutiérrez, who served people violated by military regimes (many of which the United States backed and helped finance), God’s kingdom prioritizes the oppressed. Indeed, it is one that liberates the oppressed, and, in so doing, dismantles every structure of ceaseless oppression. God’s liberative action directly contradicts the Make America Great Again movement’s pursuit of eternal peace through bloodshed. Instead, God acts to liberate the poor and oppressed from that very bloodshed—so that no more murder will ever have to be justified in the name of keeping “peace” for the status quo of the military-industrial complex.
Gutiérrez writes that “the building of a just society means overcoming every obstacle to the creation of authentic peace.” For Gutiérrez, justice is not merely deferred to an abstract notion of the “end times,” but present with the poor and oppressed in the here and now as a real and liberative presence. As such, war will not be part of God’s new order that is presently disrupting and dismantling the established old order.
As much as Trump and his white evangelical supporters like to believe that their American militarism will usher in a new order of things, it is a distortion of the truth. Some American Christian leaders, including Pope Leo XIV and Catholic Archbishop Timothy Broglio, have opposed this distortion. It is a lie veiling the reality that their wars are of the “old order of things”—a way of ordering the world that is bound to pass away.
God’s kingdom is ushered in not by war but by acts of liberation, resistance, and struggle against the powers and principalities that oppress us. It challenges the old order of the military-industrial complex so that young children in Iran and elsewhere might live, free to delight in the gift of going to school without the threat of American bombs.
God’s kingdom is ushered in not by war but by acts of liberation, resistance, and struggle against the powers and principalities that oppress us.
The task before us today is the work of participation, of peacemaking as an act of building a new kingdom. The task before us is the refusal of Trump’s weaponization of “peace,” assenting instead to God’s peace that surpasses all understanding. It is this faithful and holy work of refusal that offers the world glimpses of a peace that will have no end—a new order of things that, as Isaiah 11:6-9 proclaims, imbues all creation with the end of war itself.
Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled religious scholar and museum worker based in Washington, D.C.
Yanan (or Abdul) is a theologian from the Philippines. He writes about Christian radical politics, and his writing has appeared in BitterSweet Monthly, Interfaith America, the Institute for Christian Socialism, and other outlets.
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