Not Everything Kept Should Be Counted
A hundred days into Trump’s second presidency, the media is at it again. Tallying promises kept, broken, or in progress.
As if governance were a customer service agreement. As if checking a box on a campaign tracker tells us what we really need to know.
But the trouble with treating Trump’s slogans as promises is that they were never policy commitments in any serious sense.
“Build the wall.” “Drain the swamp.” “Stop the cheat.” These weren’t legislative agendas. They were vibes. Grievances packaged as governance.
To treat them as stable benchmarks is to pretend they were ever meant to be stable. Worse, it risks giving them a legitimacy they never earned. If a president tweets out a provocation one week and signs it into executive order the next, was that really promise-keeping? Or just improvisation masquerading as resolve?
There’s a deeper problem here.
This framework—did he do what he said he’d do—misses the bigger question.
What was it he said he’d do?
Trump promised to “gut the deep state.”
Within weeks, tens of thousands of federal workers were pushed into forced resignations through the Deferred Resignation Program.
Agencies like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy were slashed or dissolved outright, their missions labeled “globalist distractions.”
It was a promise kept. And a functioning government undone.
He said he’d bring “elite accountability.”
But his own cabinet now includes a convicted fraudster, a conspiracy podcaster, and a man who shared classified military plans in a group Signal chat with his wife and personal friends.
Firing the scapegoat behind the leak checked a box. Keeping the rest signaled impunity.
He vowed “no more forever wars,” yet the U.S. has quietly expanded covert operations in Yemen and intensified proxy conflicts through private contractors—without congressional oversight or public consent.
Less visible than boots on the ground. More dangerous in the dark.
These are not isolated missteps. They are deliberate moves. Promises kept—not toward a better government, but toward a different kind of power.
When the measure becomes fidelity to rhetoric, we confuse commitment with character. We end up applauding delivery without judgment, execution without ethics. That’s not analysis. That’s stenography.
We need to be asking harder questions. Not just “Did he follow through?” but “What did he follow through on, and at what cost?”
If a promise leads to cruelty, overreach, or authoritarian drift, is keeping it something to be admired?
In a moment like this—when civil liberties hang by a thread, when entire agencies are being gutted overnight, when dissent is being recast as disloyalty—the question isn’t whether Trump is keeping his promises.
It’s whether we’re keeping ours.