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.
In December, he touted the Kennedy Center board’s decision to add his name to the organization’s. This was a function of an earlier pronouncement from Trump, overhauling the board to include art world luminaries like Fox News host Laura Ingraham. But the center’s name is a function of Congress, not the board, and Congress didn’t change the name. The president’s offered other toothless announcements, too: Just this month, Trump announced that “[e]ffective January 20, 2026, I, as President of the United States, am calling for a one year cap on Credit Card Interest Rates of 10%.” This has no force in law, as National Economic Council chair Kevin Hassett admitted in an interview Friday. (Maybe, Hassett speculated, credit-card companies would introduce “great new Trump Cards,” with such interest-rate caps.) There are a few categories of promises that Trump made which should be considered in the aggregate. For example, his pledges on tariffs. Trump posted about new tariffs and new trade deals constantly over his first year in office, a reflection of the endlessly evolving and complex landscape that he sculpted. The law firm Reed Smith has a running overview of the tariff landscape, a document that has been updated more than 50 times by a team of six people. A large chunk of the changes tracked in that document were paired with celebratory or threatening social media posts by Trump. At the beginning of last year, Trump also spent a significant amount of time crowing about the massive savings that were being seen through the “efficiency” effort being led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Oh, wait — scratch that. Ramaswamy’s involvement was triumphantly announced by Trump on Nov. 12, 2024, but he left the team soon after Trump’s inauguration after reportedly clashing with Musk. Anyway, the government spent more money in 2025 than it had in 2024, meaning that Trump’s sharing of a news article on Feb. 19 about Americans potentially getting a “dividend” from all the purported savings came to naught. Trump also got out over his skis on a number of other purported wins. He shared frequent updates about how close Russia and Ukraine were to a peace deal — a deal that, as you likely know, remains elusive. He also trumpeted his success in resolving a dispute between Thailand and Cambodia, one of the “wars” he likes to say he resolved. It has not been. As we enter the second year of Trump’s second term, it will be worth tracking how his pledges and promises evolve. The president also took credit for crime declines in Chicago and Washington, D.C., after the deployment of federal troops or agents in each city. But crime was down in a number of cities in 2025, and the presence of National Guard soldiers did not have a discernible effect on D.C. I’ll admit that much of this overview can be summarized as “Donald Trump is not a reliable narrator,” the sort of finding that does not count as particularly revelatory. But it is still worth remembering, given the number of claims and assertions Trump has made that have not yet been resolved. He’s insisted that birthright citizenship will or should be revoked, for example, which is currently under consideration at the Supreme Court (and seems unlikely to go his way). In October, he told federal law enforcement officials that anyone burning a flag could face a year in prison — another question that is working its way through the courts and that precedent suggests will not land in compliance with Trump’s desires. As we enter the second year of Trump’s second term, it will be worth tracking how his pledges and promises evolve. And, as always, it will be worth remembering that no matter how forcefully and confidently Trump insists that something is or may be the case — it often isn’t and won’t be.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
