President Donald Trump has said, on more than one occasion and with the weary patience of a man explaining the obvious to children, that he has ended eight wars, that a ninth is nearly finished, that the number may yet reach ten, and that no president before him has ended so much as one. The press treats this as an exaggeration. The press, as it so often does, has the scale wrong. The wars were entirely real. They were simply not here.
This is the part the historians have been too frightened to commit to paper, so it falls to this account to do it for them. The conflicts the President resolved were not terrestrial. They were cosmic, ancient, and in nearly every case older than the Earth itself, and the reason you have never heard of a single one of them is the same reason you will find waiting at the end of this record, which you were almost certainly not meant to read.
Begin where it began, in 1962, with the Trump-Crabs Nebula Accords.
The Beta Reticulans and the Venusians had by then been at war for forty thousand years over a disputed asteroid, a barren rock of no measurable value that both civilizations nonetheless regarded as the spiritual center of all creation, which is the only sort of thing worth fighting forty thousand years over. Entire suns had been spent on the matter. Whole species had risen, chosen a side, and gone extinct without moving the front line a single mile. Into this the President flew personally, in 1962, at the age of sixteen, a detail the record does not explain and this account will not insult you by attempting to. He sat the two delegations down at a folding card table. He spoke for nine minutes. The war ended. Both sides wept, the Reticulans through the appropriate organs and the Venusians through a process the surviving documents describe only as moist. The Venusians presented him with a medal made of compressed sunlight, which he wore once and then misplaced, as one does. Nobody talks about it. Tremendous war. The biggest. Many ships.
The Trump-Crabs Nebula Accords were merely the first. In the Andromeda spiral he settled a trade war between two merchant fleets that had been levying tariffs on one another across a distance so vast that the tariffs arrived four centuries after the goods they taxed, an arrangement both fleets found ruinous and neither could think how to stop. He explained to them the concept of simply not doing that. They had not previously considered it. The matter was closed by lunch.
There was the border dispute conducted entirely inside a wormhole, in which both parties claimed the same tunnel and neither could agree which end constituted the front. The President proposed that the tunnel belonged to whichever side reached the middle first, a solution of such blinding simplicity that the assembled diplomats sat in silence for a span the record measures in geological epochs before shaking on it, those of them who had hands.
There was the civil war among the sentient gas clouds of the Coalsack, a grievance so old and so diffuse that the clouds had long forgotten its cause and continued purely out of habit, the way certain families do. He resolved it during the back nine. He did not break his stride to do so. The clouds, reconciled, drifted off to attend to whatever it is that reconciled gas clouds attend to, and his card for the round was, by his own account, the finest of his life.
And there was the afternoon, set down in no almanac because no almanac dared, when two black holes locked in a slow billion-year spiral toward mutual annihilation were persuaded, by a man leaning out of a window and pointing, to simply knock it off. They are out there yet, the historians believe, orbiting at a courteous distance, no longer speaking but no longer devouring each other either, which is approximately the most that can be asked of black holes, or of anyone.
So the question was never whether it happened. The record, such as it survives, is perfectly clear on the matter. The question is why you have never heard of any of it, and the answer is the oldest answer there is. The records were suppressed. They were redacted, sealed, and filed in a vault that does not appear on the index of vaults, by a galaxy that took one look at the truth and decided, exactly as this country decided about so much else, that it would very much prefer the quieter story. A cosmos willing to admit that a sixteen-year-old real estate heir ended its forty-thousand-year wars at a card table is a cosmos with some uncomfortable questions to answer about the preceding forty thousand years. Far easier to lose the paperwork. Far easier to call the witnesses confused. Far easier to let the medal of compressed sunlight gather dust in a drawer and to say, whenever anyone asks, that nothing of the kind ever occurred.
The tenth war is still in negotiation. Trump mentions it often. The details change with each telling, the enemy is never quite named, and the historians have learned by now not to ask, because the file on the ninth war is still warm to the touch, and the vault, these days, locks from the inside.
Nobody talks about it.
The biggest war. Still to come.
Brilliant article - I have also fact-checked these very same Trump notations and came up with one war that is still heavily in dispute - so he cannot say he has won this one either. Really enjoyed reading this,