The Trump administration announced Wednesday that 2,200 U.S. troops will leave Iraq and 4,100 will depart Afghanistan over the next two months. This came only two days after Trump blasted top military officials who, in his telling, want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.

Last month, isolationist Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) endorsed Trump during a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention, declaring that the president believes as I do that a strong America cannot fight endless wars.

This was also Trumps posture in 2016, when he ran as a candidate who would pull America from foreign quagmires. Its as phony now as it was then, and unfortunately for Trump, who spent Wednesday tweeting 17 times about the news that a Norwegian parliamentarian nominated him for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, theres a record to prove it.

The very same military leadership Trump blasted as bloodthirsty has been planning that drawdown from Iraq for months , and over the past year, Trump has deployed more than twice as many troops as he now plans to withdraw a total of 14,000 to other parts of the Middle East.

Incidentally, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, who nominated Trump for the Peace Prize, is known for saying Muslims are inherently overly aggressive. The achievement for which he praised Trump helping to establish diplomatic relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is tied to a major military build-up by the UAE.

And for all his fulminations against the military-industrial complex, the weapons industry is one of the big winners of the Trump era. The president has grown close to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two defense giants he had previously accused of fleecing the American taxpayer, in his typically transactional way.

He presents himself as helping the economy by appearing at weapons production facilities in swing states and boasting about encouraging other countries to buy their products. The companies benefit from his historically large Pentagon budgets and commitment to record arms sales which he seeks to shield from congressional and expert oversight and concerns about morality, like when his administration forced through weapons to Saudi Arabia after its assaults on Yemen and murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.