Eric Trump reupped the old mistruth that his father was the first president in US history to not start a war while in office.

This false statement, which became so widely repeated in 2021 it prompted multiple news outlets to conduct fact-checks disproving the claim, was parroted by the former president’s son during a Wednesday appearance on Newsmax.

“He’s anti-war … he didn’t want to go to war,” Eric Trump told host Eric Bolling of his father. “He’s the first president in the United States history that didn’t start a war.”

In 2021, Reuters and several other news outlets produced fact-checks that would dismantle this unfounded claim that got picked up by the president’s other son, Donald Trump Jr, and multiple other misinformed Trump-loyalists.

For Reuters, which acknowledged that defining when a war begins and ends is muddying business in itself, it found that even with the liberal cut-off of just looking at post-Second World War conflicts, there are nine presidents in US history that have not initiated a war.

Between 1945 and 2022, Mr Trump joins a list of eight other commanders in chief who did not enter a new conflict during their administration, including Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The four of the 13 presidents since 1945 who have sent troops to fight in new foreign conflicts are Harry S Truman, Lyndon B Johnson, George H W Bush and George W Bush, who began the Korean...

Read Full Story: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/eric-trump-pres...