It’s easy to forget, but Donald Trump actually broke with Republican Party orthodoxy in 2016 on a key issue: lowering prices on prescription drugs. In fact, he complained bitterly before taking office about the pharmaceutical industry’s powerful lobbyists, and said drug companies were “getting away with murder.”

In his first term, the president even accused the drug industry of corruption, arguing that pharmaceutical companies contributed “massive amounts of money” to politicians as part of a scheme to keep the cost of medicines higher.

That posture didn’t last. Trump put a pharmaceutical company executive in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and just as importantly, he tapped a top lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company to serve as one of the key architects of his first-term drug-price plan.

With this in mind, around this time seven years ago, Trump unveiled a policy he seemed quite excited about, boasting to Americans that “in two weeks” — it’s always “two weeks” — the public would see “massive drops in prices” thanks entirely to a presidential directive he’d signed.

There were no massive price drops. In fact, the Republican’s entire policy proved to be a bust that was rejected in the courts, and his bold promises went unfulfilled.

It fell to Joe Biden to make progress on an issue where Trump had failed.

Years later, the incumbent president has nevertheless returned to the issue with unnerving hype, declaring that he was poised to deliver an announcement that would be “as big as it gets.” As The New York Times reported on Trump’s new executive order, there was a sizable gap between what he promised and what he delivered.

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order asking drugmakers to voluntarily reduce the prices of key medicines in the United States. But the order cites no obvious legal authority to mandate lower prices. The order said the administration would consider taking regulatory actions or importing drugs from other countries in the future if drugmakers do not comply. It was something of a win for the pharmaceutical industry, which had been bracing for a policy that would be much more damaging to its interests.

To be sure, the president did sign an executive order and used audacious rhetoric that made the Republican sound like an acolyte of independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Americans who simply looked at headlines about Trump “tackling” the high cost of prescription medications might’ve thought he’d done something meaningful that will make a different in consumers’ lives.

The president certainly seemed eager to feed those impressions, declaring on his social media platform, “DRUG PRICES TO BE CUT BY 59%, PLUS!”

The problem, of course, is that like so much of what Trump says, these boasts weren’t true. As The Washington Post’s report on the executive order note, the new White House policy has no “clear mechanisms for providing fast relief to American patients,” was short on substantive details, and “lacks teeth that would compel lower prices in the near term.”

The Post’s report went on to note that Trump’s directive was so meaningless that the stock prices of many large pharmaceutical companies went up, not down, after the president signed his executive order.

Pretty much every dimension of this is difficult to take seriously. Trump’s executive order is similar to his failed first-term initiative; there’s literally no reason to believe it will be effective; it relies heavily on voluntary price drops from an industry that has no real incentive to cut its own profits; and relies on an approach to price controls that the president has repeatedly condemned.

Trump struggled to even guess the impact of his own vague policy. “Drug prices will come down by much more really if you think,” he said. “But between 59% and 80% and I guess even 90%. … We’re getting them down 60%, 70%, 80%, 90%. But actually more than that if you think about it in a way, mathematically.”

Well, that ought to clear things up.

If the president is serious about making a real difference on this issue, he could throw his support behind Bernie Sanders’ legislation that would actually lower drug costs. But until that happens, Trump’s claims about his largely meaningless executive order offer more heat than light.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.