In the theater of American politics, promises are political capital. Most politicians make promises cautiously, knowing that if they fail to fulfill them, they will be held accountable
But Donald Trump has rewritten the script. He repeatedly offers sweeping vows, yet the results often don't follow; somehow, he escapes the day of reckoning.
How can that be?
Examples are abundant. From pledging to end the war in Ukraine "before taking office" to claiming he alone could denuclearize North Korea. And what is particularly unique is that Trump's declarations are rarely modest. Yet for some inexplicable reason, when his outcomes fail or when summits stall, walls remain unfunded, or health care reform collapses, he magically pivots, reframes, or moves on.
Through 12 years of Donald Trump, the spectacle continues, uninterrupted and many of us drown unfulfilled promises. The outrage and emotional venting flood the media, but strategic analysis is what the moment demands.
First, let's face the facts. Trump's actions are not just political bravado. His actions are a strategic recalibration of how promises function in public life that the opposition has not fully come to terms with.
With respect to the political calculus, it is essential to understand that Trump's supporters often don't measure him by policy outcomes, but rather by his emotional resonance. Those who voted for him didn’t do so just to see him manage effectively; he's a symbol of defiance, dominance, and disruption and as such results sometimes fall by the wayside. In this frame, broken promises aren't failures; they're part of the process of fighting "the swamp."
Donald Trump is a cult figure and thus success is measured by different standards.
Additionally, Trump's understanding of media saturation plays to his advantage. Trump floods the daily news cycle with constant messaging, burying yesterday's unmet pledge under today's provocation. The news cycle rarely lingers long enough for sustained accountability. And in a fragmented media landscape, tribal loyalty often trumps factual scrutiny. This all plays into the chaos theory that I have previously written about in the Fulcrum.
The ultimate cost to our democratic republic remains to be seen. When symbolic politics eclipse substantive governance, public trust erodes. Ultimately will the electorate care? Traditional theory suggests that success in politics is dependent on fulfilling promises and that words matter, and leaders are accountable to them. If that expectation collapses, we risk replacing deliberation with performance and policy with personality.
Will this traditional theory of accountability collapse under the weight of Trump's theatre? For the short term, it has, but the long-term ability for Trump to avoid accountability remains unclear. Historically, Americans tend to separate charisma from competence and when they do they demand accountability.
Of course, I might be old-fashioned in my thinking, believing that honest politics matters. Yet it is my faith in the American people that gives me hope anchored by civic awareness, a diligent media, and just basic common sense.
Whether I am a blind optimist or a fool will be apparent within the next three and a half years.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.