As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, the ambitious promises he made during his campaign are facing the harsh realities of governance. The gap between his bold claims and the practical challenges of implementing them is becoming increasingly glaring.
Starting with Elon Musk, co-head of the Department of Governmental Efficiency, we see that the golden tickets to prosperity and efficiency that DOGE promised us are already tarnishing when faced with the harsh demands and limitations of governance and the real world.
Musk initially pledged to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. However, he has since scaled back this promise. In a recent interview, he described the $2 trillion figure as a “best-case outcome” and suggested that achieving a $1 trillion reduction is more realistic. Redefining what would be a successful result, Musk emphasized that the federal budget is a “target-rich environment for saving money” and that even a $1 trillion cut would be an “epic outcome.”
In his campaign speeches, Trump had repeatedly boasted that he would end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” of taking office. However, now Trump’s team has informed European officials that ending the war in Ukraine will take several months, despite Trump’s earlier grandiose claims.
Like most politicians, in his campaign Trump stoked the anger of voters by dwelling on the prohibitive cost of food in the post-pandemic era. He hammered the Biden administration relentlessly, blaming the President for the rise in cost and promised that he would resolve that issue. “I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker. “Very simple word, groceries. Like almost — you know, who uses the word? I started using the word — the groceries. When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
But once the election was over, he changed his tune. When asked whether his presidency would be a failure if he couldn’t bring down grocery prices, Trump said, “Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.” Apparently, he did not know this when he blamed Biden for the upsurge in cost of living that had in fact, started under his own administration in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
While his campaign promises were ambitious, they are shown to be only empty rhetoric when they come face to face with the reality of economics—global and domestic; but also, with the hard fact that the President of even the most powerful nation on Earth cannot solve problems single-handedly—and sometimes, not at all. Leadership has its limits even when the leader is genuinely interested in solving problems and not just in spouting bombastic rhetoric.
As the new Trump administration looms in the immediate future, let us remind ourselves of the big promises he made in his first go-round in the Oval Office and how they turned out.
He promised to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. While some sections of the wall were constructed, Mexico did not cover the cost, and the new construction was little more than a patch up job to fill in the missing sections.
Repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare): despite multiple attempts, the administration failed to deliver a comprehensive replacement plan, leaving millions of Americans uncertain about their healthcare coverage. Even now he has expressed intentions to make changes to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) during his second term, but as in the first, he seems to have no concrete plans on how to achieve this objective and limits himself to the banality that he wants to make it “better” and “less expensive.”
He had promised to achieve 4% economic growth, yet the US came nowhere near this, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and according to ProPublica, the “King of Debt” built up the national debt so high that “it will weigh down the economy for years.”
A key principle of the America First policy was to bring back manufacturing jobs, but despite an aggressive pro-business agenda, the results for the manufacturing sector were mediocre, and the pandemic further impacted the economy. Experts agree that the dynamics of the global economy, such as global supply chains, cost of labor and technological advances, make this little more than a pipe dream.
There are more, but these unfulfilled promises have become the hallmark of a president who uses and abuses rhetoric with the sole purpose of self-aggrandizement and shirking responsibility when they don’t come to fruition. One who has a difficult time acknowledging reality.
