Trump offers murky worldview ahead of second term

Throughout his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised national prosperity and world peace, saying he would quickly reduce the prices of groceries at local supermarkets and bring an abrupt end to the country's deadly wars. stranger.

He echoed that optimistic message during a major news conference Monday, saying his second term would be the most exciting and successful period of reform and renewal in all of American history, perhaps in l world history.

America's golden age, I call it, he said. It's started.

Then again, maybe not. Trump also warned that things could go wrong, like when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted out of nowhere during his first term.

We hope we don't have any interim problems, he said, because things happen.

The remarks are the latest example of Trump's idea of ​​presenting himself as the strong man who fixes all the world's problems, running headlong into his penchant for pessimism that portrays the world as a dangerous place, the nation as a a ruined wreck and himself as the unworthy victim of political policies. bad will and pure bad luck.

Since his victory last month, these two worldviews have repeatedly collided, as he has softened the confident rhetoric of his stump speeches, walked back some of his most grandiose campaign promises and doubled down on some of his most 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 will keep our promises. Nothing will stop me from keeping my word to you, people.

In a more recent interview with Time magazine, Trump cast further doubt on his ability to bring down food prices, a key campaign promise, saying, “It's hard to bring things down once.” once they have increased. After a campaign that spent millions on ads about the alleged threat posed by the country's small population of transgender people, he also suggested the problem was exaggerated, saying it was the subject of massive coverage and that it didn't concern many people.

At his Monday news conference, 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 thought that the Middle East would soon be in a good position.

However, he also said that if the hostages taken in Israel during the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack that precipitated the war do not return during his inauguration on January 20, all hell will break loose.

When asked to clarify, he simply replied: It won't be pleasant.

Trump also said that Russia's war against Ukraine, which he promised to end in a day during the campaign, saying it would be done in 24 hours, would actually be more difficult than resolving tensions in the Middle East. -East.

He said the fighting was producing the worst carnage the world had seen since World War II and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky must be ready to strike a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end it.

When asked directly if he thought Ukraine should cede territory to Russia as part of this deal, he said he would make it clear once he takes office and begins holding meetings as president. He then suggested that the territory was not worth conquering.

There are towns where there is not a building standing. It's a demolition site. There is not a single building standing, he said. So people cannot return to these cities. There's 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 their positions, but few who have been so fierce.

The president-elect has spoken out on so many issues on both sides that it is impossible to know what he will do after his inauguration. It's a brilliant strategy, giving him the freedom to go in any direction, said HW Brands, a distinguished historian, author and history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His predecessors, wherever they may be, must look upon them with envy.

Brands noted that Trump has less mandate than he claims, having won but not by much and failing to secure a popular majority. His margin for error is slim, Brands said.

But as long as his appeal to his base remains firm, Brands said, he will remain largely shielded from the ordinary expectations of political leaders.

One limitation, according to Brands, is that the longer he himself remains in government, the less convincing his efforts 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 defined the office through their speeches, said that Trump lives in an all-or-nothing situation, and this is reflected in his harsh statements about the direction of the country and the world.

Trump is on average much more hyperbolic than candidates have traditionally been, she said.

Presidents and presidential candidates of all stripes routinely say they will do something they can't do alone, that requires Congress, Jamieson said, as does Vice President Kamala Harris promising to sign a bill. legislation that would restore the protections of Roe v. Wade.

It's a common part of the presidential speech, it's not unusual, Jamieson said.

But Trump does something different, she says, in that he promises to accomplish completely unrealistic things and then works to reframe that promise in the eyes of his supporters once he fails to deliver on 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, then morphed into an argument that Mexico had actually paid for the wall by separately agreeing to deploy troops to the border.

Trump is able to get away with such changes for several reasons, Jamieson said. The first is that he kept other big promises, like overturning Roe v. Wade. Another reason is that his supporters understand and accept his speech as bluster, not as literal statements, but as statements that he is going to do something bigger and more impactful than what others are going to do. do, Jamieson said.

The fact that Trump has already started to walk away from his promises regarding the economy is new, she said, adding that she would be interested to see how he handles other economic promises he has made regarding reducing or the elimination of taxes, including the federal income tax, the tip tax, and the tip tax. a tax on social security benefits and an increase in prices without the costs being passed on to consumers.

Unless mainstream economists are wrong, Jamieson said, that's impossible.

One of Trump's first major opportunities to outline his worldview as he approaches his second term will be his inauguration.

Presidents have traditionally offered a hopeful vision of the country during their inaugurations, but not Trump. He shocked many political observers during his first inaugural address in 2017, when he spoke of American carnage and a nation in pain.

In a recent interview with NBC, he said his message would not be carnage this time, but unity.

Some experts, including Jamieson, were dubious because messages of unity had not come easily to Trump before.

It's like he only has one mode, his campaign mode, and he only has one goal, which is himself, Jamieson said.

Talk about unity usually focuses on something other than yourself, she says, and that seems to be a problem for her.

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