No, Trump Is Not Fulfilling His Campaign Promises

Frank Luntz is a shithead part 5 billion.

Image: Frank Luntz, 2015, credit: Gage Skidmore, CC

Conservatives have settled on a narrative to explain Donald Trump’s dismal polling. Trump, the narrative goes, has delivered on his promises—but voters are fickle and don’t understand how much he’s done for them.

Trump “in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways,” Axios babbled in a piece whose sourcing relies on Republican insiders and MAGA stooges. Meanwhile, over on twitter notoriously wrong Republican analyst Frank Luntz mused wrongly, “President Trump has delivered everything he told his supporters he’d do in his first six months.” Luntz rooted around in his clammy forebrain for clues and then concluded that the problem for the GOP is not policy but, “messaging.”

Axios and Luntz are partisan hacks, but even for hacks these assertions are a stunning bowel dump of hackery. Trump has not delivered on his promises; he has only “crushed” his first six months in the sense that he has ground democracy and his constituent’s well-being underfoot. His poll numbers are terrible because he has failed to do everything he said he would and has ruthlessly focused on doing things he promised not to.

I don’t have the time or the heart to enumerate every single failure of the Trump administration. But it’s worth touching on some of them just to remind ourselves that our orange overlord is in fact a massive liar, cheat, and fraud—and that the American public is right to loathe him.

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Inflation

Trump’s most consistent promise throughout the 2024 campaign was to lower prices. Voters were enraged by Covid-caused inflation, and even though Biden largely managed to get rising prices under control by the end of his term, Trump promised to go further and actually force prices to fall.

“Prices will come down,” Trump said in a speech in August 2024. “You just watch: They’ll come down, and they’ll come down fast, not only with insurance, with everything.” In September, he promised Pennsylvania grocery shoppers re their food bills: “We’ll get them down.” These promises are in part why Trump 6 of 10 voters who said they were very concerned about food prices.

So has Trump reduced inflation and food prices?

No. And also, fuck no.

In June, prices were up 2.7% from the same time in 2024, accelerating from the 2.4% increase in May. The Fed expects inflation to continue to rise over the course of 2025.

Why isn’t Trump lowering prices like he promised?

In the first place, deflation—or lowering prices—is generally impossible absent a horrific economic contraction (as happened, for example, during the pandemic shutdowns). Deflation is extremely bad; Trump’s promise (as with many Trump promises) was dangerous bullshit—even if some of his voters believed it and wanted to see lower prices at the grocery store.

Beyond that, though, Trump’s chief economic policy has been a vast increase in tariffs—which are a tax on consumer good, including food. Trump keeps pushing deadlines for draconian tariffs back because even his dimwit self is aware that super high tariffs could cause economic catastrophe. But he’s already raised tariffs up to around 15% as a baseline—and that’s going to make goods cost more. Nestle has said it’s going to raise the price of candy bars. Johanna Goods, an orange juice importer, is suing the Trump administration over its 50% tariff hikes with Brazil, arguing that the tariffs raise prices so much it would put the company out of business.

Currently Trump’s approval on inflation is at -28 points; one of his best issues has become one of his absolute worst. This isn’t a messaging problem; it’s not because voters are fickle. It’s because Trump said he was going to lower prices, and has instead raised them—and keeps threatening to raise them further through tariff policies that are themselves immensely unpopular.

People hate Trump’s inflation policies because they think he lied to them and broke his promises. And they think that because he did in fact lie to them and break his promises.

War

During the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly—even obsessively—promised that he would end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office. “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done — I’ll have that done in 24 hours,” he said in 2023, a claim he repeated throughout 2024.

As you are probably aware, the Russian war on Ukraine did not end on Trump’s first day in office. On the contrary, seven months into his term, it is still ongoing.

Trump’s failure here is so flagrant and so obvious that he came as close as he ever does to admitting he reneged on a promise. In an interview in April he insisted that he hadn’t meant it when he said he’d solve the war in a day: “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point,” he prevaricated. "Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.”

Trump also promised during the campaign that his amazing deal making skills would bring peace to the Middle East and end the conflict between Gaza and Israel. “Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people,” he said. He urged Israel to “finish the job”—though it was unclear whether he wanted them to defeat Hamas or simply murder everyone in Gaza.

Again, despite Trump’s promises, the war in Gaza has not ended. It has, in fact, gotten worse, and more and more explicitly genocidal. Even Trump himself has been forced to admit that people in Gaza are starving, and to suggest that Israel could do better distributing food. (Israel is, of course, actively blocking aid in an effort to exterminate the Gazan people.)

Trump’s promises about Ukraine and Gaza were (as even he acknowledges) ridiculous. But he made them. He told his supporters he would magically institute peace on earth. He did not do that, and in fact, the conflicts in both places have gotten much worse in his tenure, thanks in part to his own fecklessness and the cluelessness of his wildly unqualified national security staff. Anyone who trusted Trump on foreign policy has been betrayed.

Medicaid and Medicare

Trump has repeatedly promised not to touch Medicare or Medicaid. As recently as March, the White House was boasting about Trump’s refusal to cut those programs, and insisting that news orgs were lying when they said Medicare and Medicaid were threatened.

Of course, it was not news orgs lying, but the Trump administration. The massive budget reconciliation bill which Trump signed into law includes 1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, the biggest cuts to the program in history. The bill also cuts Medicare for legal immigrants, blocks programs which lower Medicare costs for lower income recipients, and makes it harder for Medicare to reduce drug costs for recipients.

So, again, Trump promised one thing and delivered the exact opposite. People voted for him to protect Medicaid and Medicare and instead he gutted the first and significantly slashed the second. This is again, why people are saying they don’t approve of the job he’s doing, Luntz, you putz.

And more

There are lots of other examples. Trump said he’d deport people with criminal records specifically; instead his masked gestapo is arresting people with no criminal records at worksites and immigration court hearings. Trump said he’d do better in providing disaster relief to North Carolina and other states than the Biden administration; instead he’s denied North Carolina aid requests and kneecapped FEMA response. He claimed he wouldn’t implement Project 2025 and its vicious assault on the federal workforce; instead he did. He said he’d release the Epstein files; we all know what’s happening with that.

And then there’s all the stuff Trump just didn’t mention on the campaign trail that is wildly unpopular, like cutting cancer research. Trump did not promise to fund cancer research, because everyone just assumes that the president will keep funding cancer research because who doesn’t want to fund cancer research? The answer, apparently, is Trump. He wants you to die of cancer. That is unpopular. If you can believe it.

Thanks to Republican control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and thanks to the enthusiasm of corporate and media billionaires for the MAGA agenda, Trump has accomplished a lot while in office. He’s gutted health care; he’s flooded the streets of many cities with armed kidnappers; he’s destroying higher education; he’s slashed arts funding; he’s resegregating the federal government; he’s relentlessly and successfully attacked the First Amendment and intimidated those who criticize him. His administration is transforming the face of America, and turning that face more bloated, more ugly, mor vacuous, and more orange.

But the problem for Trump is that, while his hardcore supporters welcome these changes, they are in general not in fact what he promised the American people. On the campaign trail, he said he would usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Instead, he’s been laser focused on jacking up prices, shredding the safety net, destroying democracy, and instituting a reign of terror.

Many Americans were willing to embrace authoritarian racism if they also got cheap food, peace on earth, and an assurance that their healthcare would remain in place. They wanted some evil and some bigotry as long as it didn’t hurt them in particular.

Instead, former MAGA voters are learning that authoritarians lie, and once they are in power they do what they want—which mostly means immiserating others and enriching themselves. That’s why Trump’s approval rating is terrible. And it’s why his polls are likely to sink further as he continues to break his promises, to destroy our democracy, and to make us all poorer, sicker, sadder, and less free.