I have blogged before about Donald Trump conducting presidential campaigns and making all kinds of braggadocio statements about what he is going to do and then failing to do so as president. For instance, in his third presidential campaign, during last year, he kept saying that if he got reelected as president he would solve Russia’s war in Ukraine on “day one” of his presidency. He said that on the basis of bragging about his relationship with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. (See my posts “Is Donald Trump a Russian Asset?” and “AI Chatbot Grok Say Trump Likely Is a Russian Asset.”)
Trump’s Ludicrous Promises as President
Furthermore, Trump had been saying repeatedly that if he had remained president during 2021-2025, instead of losing his reelection bid to Joe Biden in November, 2020, Putin never would have sent his troops into Ukraine to make war. Yeah, sure. Trump is like many politicians, even more so, who promise the moon and don’t deliver. They make promises that are about impossible to keep. Trump demonstrated this at the very beginning of his political career. He won the White House mostly for his audacious claim that he would build a very expensive 2,000-mile wall along our southern border to stop illegal immigration, and “Mexico will pay for it.” Anyone who believed that—well, I won’t say anymore!
This time around, Trump also had said he would stop the war in Gaza. Yeah, sure! Actually, he could stop giving Israel military weapons with which to destroy Gaza and those living there, but he hasn’t. He just let’s Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu keep doing what he’s doing there and not even condemning it, which has so far resulted in 65,000 dead Palestinian civilians.
Trump not only was not able to stop the war in Ukraine—the largest war in Europe since WWII—on the first day of his presidency, he has largely been sidelined by Putin about it even though Trump held a summit in Alaska weeks ago with Putin about it. And the very next day, Russia drilled the daylights out of Ukraine with missiles, killing lots of civilians.
And today at the UN General Assembly meeting in New York City, Trump bragged about having stopped “seven wars” in the world in only the short time of eight months of his presidency, which is not true at all.
Because of such failure despite his previous brash statements otherwise, Trump has been questioned repeatedly by the media about this failure. Oftentimes when that happens, he chastises reporters for being “hateful.” But today, he turned to another of his tactics—claiming that he was only joking. Yeah, sure! He was only joking constantly during his campaign that he would get the Ukraine war stopped on the first day of his presidency. That, dear readers, is not something anyone with a brain jokes about. Trump must think his hearers are a bunch of village idiots to believe such a lie. Estimates by some governments are that about 250,000 Russian soldiers have died and about 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers have died in this war’s three and half years of existence. Those numbers are nothing to joke about.
Trump Says, “I Am Only Joking”
In April this year, Trump told Time magazine that he was only joking when he promised during his 2024 campaign that if reelected president he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of his presidency. Time reported that Trump then said, “I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news…. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.” What a bunch of gobbledygook! What a contradiction! Plus, people sure didn’t think he was jesting.
Conclusion
Trump needs to read the wisdom literature in that Bible he sells. Proverbs 26.18-19 in the NRSV says, “Like a maniac who shoots deadly firebrands and arrows, so is one who deceives a neighbor and says, ‘I am only joking!'”
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