Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised national prosperity and global peace, saying he would quickly reduce the cost of food in local supermarkets and abruptly end deadly wars abroad.
He echoed that optimistic 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, perhaps global history.”
“I call it the Golden Age of America,” he said. “It has begun.”
Then again, maybe not. Trump also issued a warning — a warning that things could go very wrong, like when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged “out of nowhere” during his first term.
“We hope we don't have any problems in between,” he said, “because things happen.”
The comments were the latest example of Trump's view of himself as the strongman who solves all the world's problems, rushing into his penchant for pessimism: portraying the world as a dangerous place, the nation as a crumbling disaster and himself the undeserved victim of political ill will and sheer bad luck.
Since his victory last month, those dueling worldviews have clashed repeatedly, as he has softened the confident rhetoric of his speeches, walked back some of his grandest campaign promises and doubled down on some of his most dire warnings about a future full of chaos. .
In his victory speech, Trump said he would “govern with a simple motto: promises made, promises kept. We will 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 new doubt on his ability to lower food prices (a key campaign promise) by saying, “It's hard to lower things once they go up.” After a campaign that spent millions on ads about the supposed threat posed by the country's small transgender population, he also suggested that the issue has been blown out of proportion, saying it “gets massive coverage and it's not a lot of people.”
During his Monday press conference, Trump said he had 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 the hostages taken from Israel during the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack that precipitated the war are not returned before his inauguration on Jan. 20, “all hell will break loose.”
When asked for clarification, he simply said: “It won't be pleasant.”
Trump also said that Russia's war against Ukraine, which he promised to end in one day during the campaign, saying, “I'll do it in 24 hours,” will be “actually more difficult” than addressing tensions in the Middle East.
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 reach an agreement” with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end it.
When 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 starts having meetings as president. He then suggested that territory is not worth fighting over.
“There are cities in which there are no buildings standing. It's a demolition site. There is no building standing,” he said. “So people can't return to those cities. There is nothing there. “It's just rubble.”
According to historians and political discourse experts, Trump's wildly vacillating rhetoric is unique among presidents: many of whom have overpromised or changed positions, but few so wildly.
“The president-elect has talked about so many issues on both sides that it is impossible to know what he will do after taking office. It's a brilliant strategy, leaving you free to move in any direction,” said HW Brands, a noted historian, author and history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Your predecessors, wherever they are, must be watching with envy.”
Brands noted that Trump has less of a mandate than he claims, as he won but not by much and failed to secure a popular majority. Their “margin for error is small,” Brands said.
But as long as his “appeal to his base remains strong,” Brands said, “he will remain largely immune to the ordinary expectations of political leaders.”
One limit, Brands said, is that “the longer he is in government, the less persuasive his efforts will be to blame the 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 examines how presidents have defined the office through their speech, said Trump “ lives in an all-or-nothing world,” and it is reflected in his crude pronouncements about the direction of the country and the world.
“Trump, on average, is much more hyperbolic than candidates have traditionally been,” he said.
Presidents and presidential candidates of all stripes “routinely claim that they will do something that they can't actually do alone, that Congress requires,” Jamieson said, like Vice President Kamala Harris who promised to sign a bill that would restore Roe protections. against Wade.
“That's a routine part of the presidential speech, it's not unusual,” Jamieson said.
But Trump does something different, he said, because he promises to accomplish things that are “completely unrealistic” and then works to “reframe” the promise in the eyes of his supporters once he fails to deliver.
His first-term promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall, for example, morphed into a promise that Mexico would pay for part of the wall, and then morphed into an argument that Mexico had, in fact, paid for it. wall by agreeing to deploy it separately. troops to the border.
Trump can get away with this for several reasons, Jamieson said. One is that he has fulfilled other great promises, such as overturning Roe v. Wade. Another is that his followers understand and accept his speech as bragging: “not as literal statements,” but as “declarations 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 begun to walk back his promises on the economy is new, he said, and he will be interested to see how he handles the other economic promises he has made on reducing or eliminating taxes, including the federal income tax, the tips and taxes on Social Security benefits and increase rates without passing the costs on to consumers.
“Unless traditional economists are wrong,” Jamieson said, “that's impossible.”
One of the first major opportunities for Trump to outline his worldview heading into his second term will be his inauguration.
Presidents have traditionally offered a hopeful vision for the country at inaugurations, but not Trump. He surprised many political observers during his first inaugural address in 2017, when he spoke of the “American carnage” and a suffering nation.
During a recent interview with NBC, he said that this time his message would not be “carnage,” but “unity.”
Some experts, including Jamieson, had doubts, as messages of unity had not come easily to Trump before.
“It's like he only has one mode, campaign mode, and he only has one focus: himself,” Jamieson said.
Unity speeches typically “focus on something other than yourself,” she said, “and he seems to have a problem with that.”
