Beware: Promises Being Kept

President Donald Trump signs Executive Orders, Monday, February 10, 2025, in the Oval Office. (Official White House photo by Abe McNatt)

My friend and co-author at The Racket News, Steve Berman, recently opined that Donald Trump is endeavoring to keep his promises. For me, that’s a large part of the problem. When it comes to keeping campaign promises, the rule of garbage-in-garbage-out applies.

Steve’s first example was the Ukraine war. Yes, Trump is trying to end the war, but as George Orwell supposedly said, “The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.” The real trick isn’t ending the war; it’s ending the war in a way that discourages Putin and other aggressive dictators in countries like China from repeating the strategy.

Donald Trump only has a few levers to pull with respect to the Ukraine war. He could add more sanctions and economic pressure to Russia or he can withhold aid (again) to Ukraine. As realistic options go, that’s about it. Which one do you think is more likely? There is a hint in the fact that Trump has repeatedly blamed Ukraine for getting invaded and not rolling over and conveniently dying.

Trump can’t force Vladimir Putin to abandon his war of aggression and seems to have no interest in trying to do so. After all, so far his talks to end the war not only exclude our European allies but Ukraine itself. That’s not a recipe for peace. That’s a recipe for giving Vladimir Putin breathing room to rearm and rebuild his shattered army for a second try.

And what of Gaza? The Gaza war seemed to be effectively over months ago. As with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II, the war has reached a point where the Israeli military has largely run out of targets. That war is ending with or without Trump.

But I’m more concerned with some of Trump’s other promises. Promises that I would rather he did not keep. For example, he’s well on his way to keeping his promise to use his office to take revenge on his political enemies. That promise violates presidential norms of all shapes and sizes and isn’t good for America. And I’m not talking about prosecuting people who have broken criminal laws (like Trump himself), I’m talking about taking revenge on people who were doing their jobs but were deemed insufficiently loyal to the new old president.

His promise to engage in mass deportations is being kept. To a point, that will be popular. Illegal immigration has been a decades-long problem, but mass deportations won’t be the solution.

Illegal immigrant labor is now woven throughout our economy. Removing illegal (and sometimes legal) immigrant workers is going to result in a labor shortage pretty quickly. Farms and construction will be two segments of the economy that will be hit, and the rising prices from both will contribute to inflationary pressures.

So the mass deportation promise is going to conflict with another promise, that of lowering consumer prices. Donald Trump may not get legitimate blame for the bird flu’s impact on egg prices (and it isn’t Biden’s fault either), but when it costs more to hire workers to pick crops and build houses because Trump deported much of the labor pool, it will be his fault.

As I said, illegal immigration is a problem, but a better solution would have been comprehensive reform. We should make allowances for current illegals who are plugged in with good jobs and good records while focusing deportation on violent criminals. We should make legal immigration more streamlined and attractive than walking across the border. In exchange, everify should become the law of the land, the asylum system should be reformed, penalties for illegally crossing the border should be made stiffer, and border security should be funded adequately. See? I just solved the immigration problem in one paragraph. You’re welcome.

And speaking of rising prices, the tariff war is another promise that I’d prefer Trump didn’t keep. Some tariffs have been delayed, but the trade war is coming and it won’t be good for the economy. We know this because we saw it just a few years ago.

Initially, tariffs may goose the economy because a lot of consumers and companies will increase their inventories and make big purchases before the trade taxes kick in. Before long, however, prices go up and the impact of rising costs ripples throughout the economy. Again, the tariff promise contradicts the promise to lower prices, but guess which one will be kept.

The tariffs of Trump’s first term led to a manufacturing recession and a net loss of American manufacturing jobs. There’s no reason to expect a different result this time.

And the tariffs aren’t likely to help the favored industries that they are designed to protect. When Trump slapped tariffs on steel imports in his first term, the initial effect was to raise prices for domestic producers. After all, that’s what tariffs do. They make foreign imports more expensive so that domestic producers can charge more and/or be competitive with prices that are already higher. Steel stocks initially soared.

But by 2019, it was a different story. Steel buyers bought a lot of steel in the early days, concerned about rising prices and supply problems. Increased domestic production outpaced the drop in imports and the price of steel crashed like, well, like a steel girder dropping. A year after the introduction of the tariffs, both steel prices and the stocks of steelmakers fell sharply.

Trump’s bad promises aren’t just limited to foreign policy and the economy. Yesterday, RFKJR was confirmed as the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Congratulations, America, it’s an anti-vaxxer with a brainworm in charge of federal health policy. Another promise kept. Another promise I’d prefer he broke.

And RFK is far from the only dangerously unqualified nominee. He’s just the worst. (Probably.)

It’s the promises that he isn’t going to keep that I’d prefer that he did. For instance, when Trump promised unity we all knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Mar-a-Lago that this vow would be fulfilled. This is another promise that is at odds with most of what Trump has said and what he really intends. The unity promise was forgotten as quickly as it was made.

In a lot of cases, I could easily forgive Donald Trump for not keeping his promises. What I can’t excuse is following through on bad ideas.