A promise from Donald Trump isn’t worth very much. But the brazenness with which he’s already abandoning some of his key campaign pledges is nonetheless remarkable.
In the past week, Trump—who was elected, in large part, on the premise that he would rescue everyday Americans from the economic ruin Joe Biden supposedly wrought—has all but admitted he was full of shit. First, he told Meet the Press last Sunday that he “can’t guarantee” his tariff plan wouldn’t raise costs for consumers, even though he repeatedly said they wouldn’t. Then, in an interview with Time after being named its Person of the Year—a distinction he appears to relish almost as much as being elected president—he acknowledged that it would be “very hard” to actually bring grocery costs down, despite vowing, during his campaign, to “rapidly drive prices down and make America affordable again.”
“It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” Trump told Time this week.
Well, no kidding! That, in a nutshell, is what Biden and Kamala Harris were arguing. Trump, by contrast, was essentially telling his supporters that living costs could start coming down on his first day in office: “You just watch,” he said at a North Carolina rally. “They’ll come down fast.” Now, as he approaches his second term with little more than the “concepts of a plan” he touted in his September debate with Harris, he’s far less definitive: “I’d like to bring them down,” he said. “I think that they will.”
Trump didn’t only make grand economic promises, of course. He also spent his campaign trying to draw a contrast between himself as a supposed foreign policy dove and a Biden administration navigating polarizing international conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza: “I’m not going to start wars,” Trump said in his victory speech. “I’m going to stop wars.” But, when Time asked him about the “chances of going to war with Iran during your next term,” he responded: “Anything can happen. It’s a very volatile situation.”
The situation was made more volatile, it should be noted, by his 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement Barack Obama struck in his second term. Iran has pushed to increase its enrichment program since Trump tore up the agreement. Now, as he prepares to take office once again, Trump and his team are considering airstrikes on Iran to contain the country’s nuclear program, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. It’s possible he’s rattling the saber in an effort to force Tehran to the negotiating table, as he tried to do with North Korea. But a member of Trump’s transition team implied to the Journal that force may be needed against Iran because of the regime’s plot to assassinate Trump, which was outlined in Justice Department charges last month. “That certainly influences everybody’s thinking when it comes to what the relationship is out of the gate,” the transition member said.
Trump is full of bluster and hollow assurances—“We’re not touching” Social Security or Medicare, he insists, despite Republican proposals to do just that—but there are at least two agenda items he still intends to fulfill: tax cuts for the wealthy and a crackdown on immigration. The former probably won’t help the working-class Americans who helped him win back the White House based on his economic promises. But, as Trump sees it, his supporters will be satisfied if he fulfills the latter: “What was a bigger factor [than the economy], I believe, was the border,” he told Time.
And to secure it, Trump said, he would “go as far as I’m allowed to go, according to the laws of our country”—including by deploying the military and building more detention camps. “Whatever it takes to get them out,” Trump said of undocumented immigrants. “I don’t care.”
