President Donald Trump, like the previous Republican president George W. Bush, incorrectly claimed that the Middle Eastern country he wished to invade possessed a nuclear weapon. Unlike Bush, however, Trump never even attempted to create a convincing argument as to the nukes' existence.

“Trump hasn’t presented a scintilla of evidence that Iran represents an imminent nuclear or missile threat to America,” wrote Joseph Cirincione, national security analyst and anti-nuclear activist, wrote on his Substack on Sunday. “He has skipped the laborious process of manipulating the intelligence, presenting false reports and assessments, of trying to convince the American people, the Congress, our allies and the United Nations that there was an urgent necessity to go to war.”

Instead of creating a large body of supposed evidence that could be presented to the public, Cirincione said that Trump relies “on friendly and compliant media to amplify his lies over and over” and a “slavish Republican majority in the House and Senate who parrot his lies and refuse to hold any open hearings on the war or debate an authorization resolution.” The president has even tried to curtail the First Amendment right of the press to critique their activity.

“As part of his effort to consolidate Trump’s authoritarian rule, his Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr is threatening to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who ‘want us to lose the war’ by reporting stories unfavorable to the administration,” Cirincione wrote. “Trump is also aided by legions of well-funded groups backing the far-right government of Israel who are happy to support a war that they believe will destroy a country they consider the arch-enemy of Israel.”

The anti-nuclear activist also commented that Trump is better serving the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than he is his own.

“I have been in Washington for over 40 years and I cannot remember a time when Netanyahu did not want to invade Iran,” Cirincione wrote. “His persistence paid off. He finally found an American president so stupid that he would do what every Republican and Democratic president since Ronald Reagan refused to do: start a pointless, enormously costly war with an adversary on the other side of the globe that, however odious, posed only secondary threats to America.”

Ironically, Trump spent months prior to invading Iran (and, before that, Venezuela) demanding that he be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump told Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre earlier in March regarding being snubbed. He later added, “I’m no longer interested in it [the Peace Prize]."

In the words of Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist who advised Bush, Trump’s exchange with Støre showed Trump has no interest in peace and wishes to wage war.

“No man of violence and venom can resist the siren song of modern warfare, which, after all, is just a game,” Schmidt wrote for his Substack, employing the term “game” sarcastically “This is Trump’s team: Hegseth, Rubio, Vance, Cain, Bondi, Noem, Kushner, Witkoff, Musk, Weiss, Ellison, Hannity, Graham, Patel. Never have so many nitwits commanded so much power. They are a terrifying bunch, to say the least.”

Schmidt concluded by writing “war is no game. Yet, it is treated as such by a group of vile men and women who are playing with human life as if they were gods. Trump is no god. There is no divinity lurking around Trump. There is only blackness. Only death. Only misery. Only wreckage. Only corruption.”

Earlier this month, a former employee for Trump expressed concern that the president will ultimately cause a nuclear war over Iran.

“Few Americans realize how close the president took us to the brink of nuclear war in his first term before aides talked him down,” Miles Taylor, the Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during Trump’s first term, wrote regarding the president’s warmongering against North Korea at that time. “What the public didn’t know at the time — and until years later — was that the president’s team was worried he might start a nuclear war.”