Ordinarily, presidents have to wait until they’re in the Oval Office before they start breaking campaign promises. Donald Trump, however, got the ball rolling before Inauguration Day.
As a candidate, for example, the Republican promised to lower grocery prices. As a president-elect, he said that it’d be “very hard” to lower grocery prices and that he’s no longer sure whether he’ll be able to achieve the goal.
As a candidate, Trump also said Elon Musk would uncover ways to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. As a president-elect, he saw his GOP megadonor tell the public that the $2 trillion figure was more of a “best-case outcome” than a realistic goal, adding that there might still be a “good shot” at achieving half of the incoming president’s goal.
Perhaps most important of all was Trump’s election season declaration that if voters backed him, he’d successfully broker an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine. This would happen, the Republican boasted, during his transition period and “within 24 hours.” He even repeated the vow during his presidential debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, assuring Americans that “I will get it settled before I even become president.”
As NBC News reported, Trump failed.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump vowed to quickly end the war in Ukraine. He’d do it in “24 hours” after taking the oath, he said, or even before his inauguration. But as he prepares to return to the White House, it’s clear that promise will go unfulfilled. Nearly three years after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there’s no end in sight to the war, Europe’s worst since World War II.
The New York Times published a related analysis, noting that Trump “not only has failed to keep his promise; he has also made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election in November.”
In other words, the president-elect didn’t even try to keep his promise.
What’s more, it’s important to appreciate the fact that this wasn’t just some random line that Trump blurted out once or twice by accident. On the contrary, a tally published by NOTUS found that Trump, ahead of Election Day, told voters 33 times that he’d end the devastating conflict within one day, routinely adding that this would happen before his second term began. A Reuters report recently added that the president-elect’s team now concedes “that the Ukraine war will take months or even longer to resolve, a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise.” Unfortunately for the Republican, he has a long record of falling for short of his promises. As the aforementioned Times analysis noted, Trump “did not … fully build his much-heralded border wall, much less force Mexico to pay for it. He did not wipe out the federal budget deficit or shrink the national trade deficit. He did not forge a permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which he said would be ‘not as difficult as people have thought over the years.‘ He did not repeal and replace Obamacare. He did not boost economic growth to ‘4, 5 and even 6 percent.’” Evidently, as Trump’s campaign season rhetoric crashes into reality, Americans can expect more of the same in his second term.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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