President Donald Trump talks a lot. He talks to the press a lot. He talks to people on the phone a lot. He talks to visitors to the Oval Office a lot. And he talks to the public a lot, often through his account on the social media platform he owns, Truth Social.
Since the day of the 2024 election, my analysis suggests that Trump has posted on Truth Social about 7,500 times, excluding reposts of other people’s content. That’s an average of about 17 posts a day over those 440 or so days. As I said: He talks a lot.
What this also means is that we have a remarkable archive not only of what Trump has said but what he’s promised. The president and his allies like to tout how he keeps the promises he makes — “Promises made, promises kept” was a central slogan for Trump’s 2020 reelection bid — but they generally do so without actually examining what he’s said he’s doing or will do.
So I decided to do that work for them.
What I found is probably what you’d expect: Trump often makes promises and pledges that never come to fruition or that never can come to fruition. He says things off the cuff and hypes incremental, soon-to-be-abandoned achievements. And, at times, he forgets past promises in favor of new, conflicting ones.
For example, on June 11, 2025, Trump celebrated on social media that “OUR [trade] DEAL WITH CHINA IS DONE.” He walked through some of the provisions and, as is his wont, thanked everyone for their attention to the matter. But on Sept. 19, he reported that he’d had a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in which the two “made progress on many very important issues including Trade.” So which was it?
Soon after taking office, he signed an executive order that targeted trans women and girls.
“WITH THIS EXECUTIVE ORDER,” he wrote on Feb. 5, 2025, “THE WAR ON WOMENS SPORTS IS OVER! PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT!!!”
We have a remarkable archive not only of what Trump has said but what he’s promised.
But, largely because he doesn’t have the power to reshape sports by fiat, the so-called “war” was not over. On May 27, he complained that “California, under the leadership of Radical Left Democrat Gavin [Newsom], continues to ILLEGALLY allow ‘MEN TO PLAY IN WOMEN’S SPORTS.’” Promise unkept, apparently.
At other times, Trump simply shifts his position. Soon after the election, on Dec. 2, 2024, Trump posted that he was “totally against the once great and powerful U.S. Steel being bought by a foreign company, in this case Nippon Steel of Japan.”
On May 23, 2025, though, he sang a different tune.
“I am proud to announce that, after much consideration and negotiation, US Steel will REMAIN in America, and keep its Headquarters in the Great City of Pittsburgh.” The deal, he wrote, “will be a planned partnership between United States Steel and Nippon Steel.”
It would be the largest investment in the history of Pennsylvania, the president said. But his track record there is also not good. On Aug. 31, he announced that “[m]ore than 15 Trillion Dollars will be invested in the USA” as a result of his trade deals, a figure that increases frequently. Data from the White House itself, though, puts the figure at less than $10 trillion — itself almost certainly a wild overestimate of what will actually be produced.
Trump does the same sort of inflation with tariffs, which on Nov. 22, he claimed resulted in the U.S. “taking in TRILLIONS of Dollars.” On Jan. 5, the figure fell to “more than 600 Billion Dollars” — still far, far above the less than $300 billion the country is estimated to have brought in, most of it from American consumers and businesses.
Sometimes, Trump seems to have simply forgotten promises he’d already made. On May 4, 2025, he announced he was instructing his team to “immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” On Sept. 29, another announcement: He would be “imposing a 100% Tariff on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States.” OK, then.
A lot of the things Trump promised simply never went anywhere. On Jan. 16, 2025, he announced that actors Jon Voight, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone would become “Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood.” The Los Angeles Times reported a few months later that no one in the city had heard anything else about this.
Some other Trump proclamations in that vein: Greenland is not part of the U.S., nor is Canada. The Gulf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America by the United States — and no one else. And Alcatraz is still a national park and tourist attraction rather than, as Trump blared on May 4, a prison to “house America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders.”
Sometimes, Trump seems to have simply forgotten promises he’d already made.
One of the reasons Trump makes these declarations, pretty obviously, is because it presents a sense of limitless presidential power. But, unfortunately for Trump, his power is often far more constrained than he pretends. He has learned that his base will nod along as he boasts about his pretend accomplishments, blending them together with his real ones — or with any that can be reframed as real. So it’s worth pointing out the times he’s claimed to have done — or will do — things that he can’t.








