Washington, D.C. – He had promised it to the world. Loudly, proudly, chest puffed out: Donald Trump would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours - and he’d do it before even setting foot back in the White House. It was a promise he paraded around like a magic incantation. Now that he’s actually in office, he delivers instead a sentence that sounds like something muttered by a forgetful tourist lost in a government hallway: “I just got here.”
In a post on Truth Social on Monday, Trump declared he had “NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS WAR.” Responsibility, he said, lies with Biden. Trump, he insisted, was simply too new on the job to be held accountable. You know how it goes: First you look for the light switch - then for the exit strategy.
Verbatim, the president said: “The War between Russia and Ukraine is Biden’s war, not mine. I just got here, and for four years during my term, had no problem in preventing it from happening.”
It was only a few months ago that Trump cast himself as a geopolitical superhero. The man who could fix everything with a phone call to Moscow and a steak dinner in Kyiv. Now it turns out: that wasn’t a lie, but - as he put it - “a little bit sarcastic.” That, apparently, is what it sounds like when someone treats the world as a punchline.
Imagine a doctor promising to heal a broken bone before the patient even walks into the clinic, only to say later: “I didn’t treat him, I just stumbled into the hospital.”
The new American foreign policy seems to consist of two ingredients: forgetting and deflecting. Trump now presents himself as a detached spectator in a drama for which he helped write the script. While people die in Europe, he retreats behind a shrug and a “not my war,” as if responsibility were an optional clause in the contract with history.
And perhaps that’s the most unsettling part: that a president who once declared himself the bringer of peace now shrugs his shoulders, as if it were all a misunderstanding. As if governance were a reality show. And promises just episode titles.
Trump has arrived. It’s just that his word - it never really came with him.
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