After they win elections and move into the White House, plenty of presidents at some point eventually break a campaign promise. Donald J. Trump will not even wait that long. He will break an important campaign promise the moment he takes the oath of office.
While stumping for a return to power in the fall, Mr. Trump repeatedly made a sensational if implausible pledge with profound geopolitical consequences: He would broker an end to the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. And not just in 24 hours — he would do so before being sworn in as president.
“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after we win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Mr. Trump vowed in a June rally. “I will get it settled before I even become president,” he said during his televised debate with Vice President Kamala Harris in September. “I will settle Russia-Ukraine while I’m president-elect,” he said again during a podcast in October.
This was no offhand comment, no one-off that he did not repeat. It was a staple of his public argument when it came to the biggest land war in Europe since the fall of Nazi Germany. Yet he not only has failed to keep his promise; he has also made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election in November, and the fighting will still be raging even after noon on Monday when President-elect Trump becomes President Trump again.
“Wars can’t be settled by bombast,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said in an interview. “And the missing link in his thinking is the failure to understand that Ukrainians will reach the settlement only if they are at the negotiating table from a position of strength. He’s in effect undermined their position, and that’s one reason why he hasn’t reached a solution before his inauguration.”
Mr. Trump, of course, is no stranger to hyperbole. The brash assertion that he could easily, expeditiously and single-handedly halt the war with the proverbial snap of his fingers was in keeping with the longstanding I-alone-can-fix-it image that Mr. Trump likes to present to the public.
But time and again over nearly a decade in national politics, rhetoric has run into reality and grandiose promises have fallen by the wayside. And while other presidents paid a price when they broke a promise (ask George H.W. Bush about reading his lips on taxes), Mr. Trump just plows forward without evident consequence.
He did not, for instance, fully build his much-heralded border wall, much less force Mexico to pay for it. He did not wipe out the federal budget deficit or shrink the national trade deficit. He did not forge a permanent peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which he said would be “not as difficult as people have thought over the years.” He did not repeal and replace Obamacare. He did not boost economic growth to “4, 5 and even 6 percent.”
During this transition to a second term, Mr. Trump did help force a temporary halt in the fighting in Gaza that took effect on Sunday, dispatching an envoy to press Israel to agree to the longstanding cease-fire President Biden had first put on the table. While the deal was hashed out by Mr. Biden’s team, Mr. Trump’s pressure played a critical role in finally getting it enacted, a major success for the incoming president.
But Ukraine in many ways is a far more daunting challenge for Mr. Trump because he will be starting from scratch. Unlike Gaza, there is no existing peace plan from his predecessor, with all the intricate logistics, timetables and formulas already worked out, for Mr. Trump to simply adopt and push across the finish line.
Just this month, Keith Kellogg, the new president’s designated special envoy for the Ukraine war, postponed plans to travel to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and other European cities to begin exploring the situation until after the inauguration. He told Fox News that he hoped to resolve it within 100 days, which would be 100 times as long as Mr. Trump originally promised even if successful.
“It was an absurd promise,” said Kathryn Stoner, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “The only person who can actually end the war in 24 hours is Vladimir Putin, but he could have done it years ago. Any negotiation is going to take more than 24 hours regardless of when Trump starts the clock.”
Michael Kimmage, the author of the book “Collisions,” about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the newly named director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, said that Mr. Trump’s campaign promises were always delivered “very freely” and perhaps were more about sending signals than being interpreted precisely.
“His goals with this language may be as follows: to put the government on notice that his approach to Russia and to the war will be different from Biden’s, that his key objective is to end the war and not for Ukraine to win” and “that he will be in charge and not the deep state that entrenches the U.S. in forever wars.”
Those signals have left murky how Mr. Trump imagines he will get to an agreement, but given his longstanding affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, his hostility toward Ukraine and his resistance to U.S. military aid to Kyiv, analysts expect any settlement he seeks to be favorable to Moscow. Vice President-elect JD Vance has suggested letting Russia keep the 20 percent of Ukraine it has illegally seized through aggression and forcing Ukraine to accept neutrality rather than alignment with the West, a framework echoing Russian priorities.
Asked by email why Mr. Trump had not fulfilled his campaign promise to end the war before his inauguration, Karoline Leavitt, Mr. Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, did not respond directly, but instead repeated that he will make it “a top priority in his second term.”
Since his November election, Mr. Trump met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and has spoken about meeting with Mr. Putin after his inauguration.
Representative Michael Waltz, Republican of Florida, who is set to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, stressed on Sunday that ending the Ukraine conflict remained a top priority for the new president, calling the war “literally a meat grinder of people” akin to World War I trench warfare “with World War III escalation consequences.”
But the thinking Mr. Waltz described during an appearance on “Face the Nation” on CBS sounded like the formula for a process that could take a while: “The key pieces of it: Number one, who do we get to the table? Number two, how do we drive them to the table? And then three, what are the frameworks of a deal?”
“President Trump is clear: This war has to stop,” Mr. Waltz added. “Everyone, I think, should be on board with that.”
Even if everyone is on board with that goal — and there is room for doubt — the possible terms remain thorny. Even assuming NATO membership is not in the cards, Ukraine wants serious security guarantees from the United States and Europe, especially if it is forced to give up its territory, something that Russia would object to.
Then there are questions of reparations and consequences. Who would pay to rebuild Ukraine’s devastated cities and countryside? What would happen to the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Mr. Putin and other Russian figures for alleged war crimes? Would the United States and Europe ease sanctions imposed after the 2022 full-scale invasion, and if so on what conditions? Who would police a line of de-confliction and what would happen if any cease-fire is violated?
Mr. Trump has not publicly addressed such questions in any depth, leaving many to guess. He has, however, expressed distress at the continuing casualties in Ukraine and an urgency to find the answers, whatever they may be.
“Part of the point — and this may shed a bit of light on his administration’s eventual course of action — may be not to have a script and therefore to speak in ways that obscure rather than reveal what the actual script is,” Mr. Kimmage said. “The less we know what he is up to, the more he can improvise.”
