Trump’s campaign in 2016 was full of promises of what he would accomplish if he were to be elected President. A naive (some might say “willfully ignorant”) electorate managed to squeak out an Electoral College victory for him, despite him losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by a few million votes.
Now that Trump is running for a third time, it’s worth looking at the broken dreams of his 2016 voters. Trump’s only path to victory in 2024 seems to be to leverage the inequities of the Electoral College system in much the same way that he did in 2016. (Well, that and election interference and threats of violence and illicit campaign contributions and propaganda from foreign governments.) But the road to the White House in 2024 is still festooned with Trump’s unkept 2016 promises.
Let’s take a look at a sampling of those grandiose campaign promises that were the foundation of his 2016 Campaign:
Getting Rid of Obamacare
“Real change begins with immediately repealing and replacing the disaster known as Obamacare."
- November 4, 2016, Atkinson, NH
On the campaign trail and for the first couple of years in the White House, Trump was like a broken record. The phrase “repeal and replace Obamacare” slid out of his mouth and easily as the Big Macs slid in. But that was about as specific as he ever got.
There was never any plan. Neither Trump nor any of the Republicans did any of the hard work it would have taken to come up with a plan that was better than what had become the law of the land. All he had was the “repeal and replace” talking point that he used to con his supporters into voting for him. He regularly demonized the Affordable Care Act (trying to brand it as Obamacare, thinking it would be a grievous insult to his predecessor).
But he failed to take into account the fact that millions of Americans — including Republicans — were already benefitting from the Affordable Care Act. His multiple attempts to get Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act were abject failures but he tried to blame Democrats for those failures because they didn’t go along with his attempts to destroy what Democrats had spent years working to achieve.
Building a Border Wall
"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall."
- June 15, 2015, New York City
We all know how that one turned out. He used taxpayer money to build virtually useless sections of wall in small areas of our border — walls that could be climbed over (with or without ladders) or simply walked around. He repaired existing sections of a wall and took credit for building them.
Not only did Mexico not pay for any of it, Mexican leaders excoriated him for this idiocy.
Infrastructure Week(s)
In April of 2020, the New York Times attempted to document all the times Trump touted his plans for infrastructure improvements. Starting with his campaign promise in August 2016 through multiple bloviating pronouncements during his time in office, all of Trump’s talk amounted to zilch. Like just about everything else Trump promised during his campaign, his multiple infrastructure promises amounted to absolutely no improvements to our infrastructure (unless you consider Trump’s hot air to be infrastructure).
It took the grownups in the room to get something done. More precisely, it took a Democratic administration staffed with cabinet members who weren’t trying to dismantle the agencies they headed. Less than a year into the Biden administration, in the middle of the pandemic, the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was passed and infrastructure projects in every state in the nation began breaking ground shortly thereafter.
It’s worth pointing out that numerous Republican House and Senate members who obstructed and voted against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act could hardly wait to go back to their districts and states and claim credit for the projects that were starting on their home turf. GOP hypocrisy knows no constraints.
Those three examples of Trumps inability to come through with the goods are just the sampler platter of a multitude of campaign promises that never came to pass. Here are a few more:
Forcing through the Keystone XL pipeline. This was never a good idea, both environmentally and sociologically.
Shutting down internet access for Isis. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of technology knew this was idiotic from the moment he announced it.
Removing all undocumented immigrants. Sound familiar? If he couldn’t get it done when he claimed there were 11 million undocumented immigrants, how is he going to get it done with his new claim of 28 million undocumented immigrants?
Appointing a Special Prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton. Although a staple of Trump’s fantasies, campaign promises based on personal vendettas are never a good thing.
Eliminating the Federal debt in eight years. Apparently, Trump thought that the way to accomplish that was to add $8 trillion to the Federal debt in four years.
Cancelling Federal funding for “sanctuary cities.” Yet another ill-conceived idea intended to appeal to the least educated of his voters.
The list goes on and on.
The point of highlighting these examples of Trump’s failures is not just to take a trip down incompetence memory lane but rather to remind voters in the 2024 election just how empty Trump’s campaign promises usually are. It’s also a reminder that the more his promises appeal to the basest instincts of the electorate, the less likely they are to succeed.