Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised national prosperity and global peace, saying he would quickly drive down the cost of groceries in local supermarkets and bring deadly overseas wars to an abrupt end.
He echoed that rosy message during a wide-ranging news conference Monday, saying his second term “will be the most exciting and successful period of reform and renewal in all of American history, maybe of global history.”
“The Golden Age of America, I call it,” he said. “It’s begun.”
Then again, maybe not. Trump also offered a caveat — a warning that things could go badly wrong, such as when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted “out of nowhere” during his first term in office.
“We hope we don’t have any intervening problems,” he said, “because things happen.”
The remarks were the latest example of Trump’s idea of himself as the strongman fixer of all the world’s problems running headlong into his penchant for pessimism — for casting the world as a dangerous place, the nation as a crumbling wreck and himself as the undeserving victim of political ill will and plain bad luck.
Since his victory last month, those dueling worldviews have collided repeatedly, as he has softened the assured rhetoric of his stump speeches, walked back some of his more grandiose campaign promises and doubled down on some of his more dire warnings about a future filled with chaos.
In his victory speech, Trump said he would “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises. Nothing will stop me from keeping my word to you, the people.”
During a more recent interview with Time magazine, Trump cast fresh doubt on his ability to bring down grocery prices — a key campaign promise — by saying, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.” After a campaign that spent millions on ads about the alleged threat posed by the nation’s small population of transgender people, he also suggested the issue has been overblown, saying “it gets massive coverage, and it’s not a lot of people.”
During his Monday news conference, Trump said he’d recently had a “very good conversation” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is leading a brutal campaign against Hamas in Gaza and beyond, and that he believes “the Middle East will be in a good place” soon.
However, he also said that if hostages taken from Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that precipitated the war aren’t returned by his inauguration on Jan. 20, “all hell’s going to break out.”
Asked to clarify, he simply said: “It won’t be pleasant.”
Trump also said that Russia’s war on Ukraine — which he promised to end in a day during the campaign, saying “I’ll have that done in 24 hours” — will be “actually more difficult” than addressing the Middle East tensions.
He said the fighting was producing the “worst carnage this world has seen” since World War II, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must be “prepared to make a deal” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end it.
Asked directly if he thinks Ukraine should “cede territory” to Russia in that deal, he said he would let people know once he takes office and begins having meetings as president. Then he suggested the territory isn’t worth fighting over.
“There are cities that there’s not a building standing. It’s a demolition site. There is not a building standing,” he said. “So people can’t go back to those cities. There’s nothing there. It’s just rubble.”
According to historians and experts in political speech, Trump’s wildly vacillating rhetoric is unique among presidents — many of whom have overpromised or shifted positions, but few so wildly.
“The president-elect has spoken on both sides of so many issues that it’s impossible to know what he will do after being inaugurated. It’s a brilliant strategy, leaving him free to move in any direction,” said H.W. Brands, a prominent historian, author and history professor at University of Texas at Austin. “His predecessors, wherever they are, must be watching in envy.”
Brands noted that Trump has less of a mandate than he claims, having won but not by much and failing to secure a popular majority. His “margin of error is slim,” Brands said.
But as long as his “appeal to his base remains firm,” Brands said, “he will continue to be largely immune from ordinary expectations of political leaders.”
One limit, Brands said, is that “the longer he is in government himself, the less persuasive his efforts to blame government for what his base doesn’t like.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of “Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words,” which considers how presidents have defined the office through their speech, said Trump “lives in an all-or-nothing world,” and it is reflected in his stark pronouncements about the direction of the country and the world.
“Trump on average is far more hyperbolic than candidates have traditionally been,” she said.
Presidents and presidential candidates of all stripes “routinely claim that they will do something that they actually can’t do alone, that requires Congress,” Jamieson said — such as Vice President Kamala Harris promising to sign a bill that would restore the protections of Roe vs. Wade.
“That’s a routine part of presidential discourse, that’s not unusual,” Jamieson said.
But Trump does something different, she said, in that he promises to accomplish things that are “completely unrealistic,” then works to “reframe” the promise in the eyes of his followers once he fails to fulfill it.
His first-term promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall, for example, morphed into a promise Mexico would pay for a piece of the wall, then transformed into an argument that Mexico had in fact paid for the wall by agreeing separately to deploy troops to the border.
Trump is able to get away with such shifts for a few reasons, Jamieson said. One is that he has made good on other big promises, like overturning Roe vs. Wade. Another is that his followers understand and accept his speech as bluster — “not as literal statements” but as “statements that he is going to do something that is bigger and more impactful than what other people are going to do,” Jamieson said.
That Trump has already started walking back promises about the economy is new, she said, adding that she will be interested to see how he handles the other economic promises he has made about decreasing or eliminating taxes — including the federal income tax, tax on tips and tax on Social Security benefits — and increasing tariffs without costs being passed on to consumers.
“Unless mainstream economists are wrong,” Jamieson said, “that’s impossible.”
One of the first major opportunities for Trump to describe his view of the world heading into his second term will be his inauguration.
Presidents have traditionally offered a hopeful view of the country at inaugurations, but not Trump. He shocked many political observers during his first inaugural speech in 2017, when he spoke of “American carnage” and a suffering nation.
During a recent interview with NBC, he said “carnage” would not be his message this time around, but “unity.”
Some experts, including Jamieson, were doubtful, as unity messages have not come easily to Trump before.
“It’s as if he only has one mode, it’s campaign mode, and he only has one focus, it’s himself,” Jamieson said.
Unity speeches are generally “centered on something other than yourself,” she said, “and he seems to have trouble with it.”