Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised national prosperity and global peace, saying he would quickly reduce food prices at local supermarkets and abruptly end deadly wars abroad.
He reiterated 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, perhaps even global history.”
“I call it the Golden Age of America,” he said. “It has begun.”
Then again, maybe not. Trump also offered a caveat — a warning that things could go badly wrong, like when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted “out of nowhere” during his first term.
“We hope there are no problems in between,” he said, “because things happen.”
The comments were the latest example of Trump seeing himself as the strong man who will solve all the world's problems, completely falling into his penchant for pessimism – because he sees the world as a dangerous place, the nation as a crumbling wreck, and himself even as the undeserving victim represents political unwillingness and simple bad luck.
Since his victory last month, these dueling worldviews have collided again and again, as he toned down the confident rhetoric of his campaign speeches, backed off some of his more grandiose campaign promises and doubled down on some of his more dire warnings of a future filled with chaos.
In his victory speech, Trump said he would “govern by one 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 one Interview with Time magazineTrump again expressed doubts about his ability to lower food prices – a key campaign promise – by saying: “It's hard to bring prices down once they're high.” After a campaign that spent millions on ads While the alleged threat posed by the country's small transgender population was raised, he also felt the issue was being blown out of proportion, saying: “It's massively reported on, and it's not a lot of people.”
During his press conference on Monday, Trump said he recently had a “very good conversation” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is waging a brutal campaign against Hamas in Gaza and beyond, and that he believes “the Middle East will be there.” will be “a good place” soon.
However, he also said that “all hell will break loose if the hostages kidnapped from Israel during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that sparked the war are not returned by his inauguration on January 20.” he said.
When 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 on the campaign trail, saying “I'll do it in 24 hours” – will “actually be more difficult” than dealing with tensions in the Middle East.
He said the fighting had caused the “worst bloodbath the world has ever seen” since World War II and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must be “ready to make a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin” to make that happen finish.
When asked directly whether he thought Ukraine should cede “territory” to Russia under this deal, he said he would tell people as soon as he takes office and holds meetings as president. He then suggested that the area was not worth fighting over.
“There are cities where there are no buildings left. It's a demolition point. There is no building,” he said. “So people cannot return to these cities. There's nothing there. It’s just rubble.”
According to historians and political speech experts, Trump's wildly vacillating rhetoric is unique among presidents — many of whom have overpromised or changed positions, but few of whom have so wildly.
“The president-elect has spoken on both sides on so many issues that it is impossible to know what he will do once he is inaugurated. It's a brilliant strategy that gives him the freedom to move in any direction,” said HW Brands, a noted historian, author and history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “His predecessors, wherever they are, must be watching with envy.”
Brands pointed out that Trump has a smaller mandate than he claims, since he won, but not by a large majority, and he failed to achieve a popular majority. His “margin of error is low,” Brands said.
But as long as his “appeal to his base remains firm,” Brands said, “he will continue to be largely immune to the usual expectations of political leaders.”
According to Brands, one limitation is that “the longer he is in government, the less convincing his attempts 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 speeches, said Trump ” lives in “an all-or-nothing world”, and this is reflected in his clear statements about the direction of the country and the world.
“Trump is, on average, far more hyperbolic than candidates have traditionally been,” she said.
Presidents and presidential candidates of all stripes “routinely claim that they're going to do something that they really can't do on their own, which requires Congress to do,” Jamieson said – such as Vice President Kamala Harris, who is promising to sign a bill that would protect… Roe would v. Wade.
“This is a routine part of presidential discourse, it’s not unusual,” Jamieson said.
But Trump is doing something different, she said, by promising to accomplish things that are “totally unrealistic” and then working to “reframe” the promise in the eyes of his supporters once he doesn't keep it.
His first-term promise that Mexico would pay for a border wall, for example, morphed into a promise that Mexico would pay for a piece of the wall, and then morphed into an argument that Mexico actually paid for the wall by it had agreed to build separate troops to the border.
Trump is able to get away with such changes for several reasons, Jamieson said. One is that he delivered on other big promises, like defeating Roe vs. Wade. Another reason is that his followers understand and accept his speech as bluster — “not as literal statements” but as “statements that he's going to do something that's bigger and more impactful than what other people are going to do,” he said Jamieson.
The fact that Trump has already begun to roll back his economic promises is new, she said, adding that she will be interested to see how he handles the other economic promises he has made, such as cutting or eliminating taxes – including the federal income tax and the tax on tips and taxes on Social Security benefits – and increasing rates without passing the costs on to consumers.
“Unless mainstream economists are wrong,” Jamieson said, “this is impossible.”
One of Trump's first big opportunities to present his view of the world before his second term will be his inauguration.
Traditionally, presidents have offered a hopeful view of the country at inaugurations, but not Trump. In his first inaugural address in 2017, he shocked many political observers when he spoke of “American carnage” and a suffering nation.
During one recent interview with NBCHe said that this time his message was not “slaughter” but “unity”.
Some experts, including Jamieson, were skeptical because Trump's message of unity has not been easy to achieve.
“It's like he only has one mode, which is campaign mode, and he only has one focus, which is himself,” Jamieson said.
Unity speeches generally focus “on something other than yourself,” she said, “and he seems to have trouble with that.”