When President Trump was sworn into office for his second term, he made a lot of promises to the American people. He has broken many of them.
In his 2025 inaugural address, Trump declared, “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.”
“Never again” became “right now” real quick. Trump has used the Justice Department, FBI and other federal agencies to settle personal scores and exact retribution against many who crossed him.
Trump also promised to “immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.” Instead, he has waged an aggressive war against free speech and freedom of the press.
In the name of fighting “wokeness,” Trump and his allies have imposed government dictates on what can and cannot be said in classrooms and college lecture halls.
Trump is censoring what National Parks and the Smithsonian Institution can tell Americans about slavery’s role in our history. He has filed legally absurd litigation to harass and punish media outlets over coverage he doesn’t like.
The MAGA war on free speech and the progressive advocacy community has intensified since the murder of Trump ally Charlie Kirk. Last week, Trump’s FCC commissioner threatened ABC over comments Jimmy Kimmel made about the right-wing reaction to Kirk’s murder. In the latest example of corporate capitulation to Trump’s authoritarian demands, ABC took Kimmell off the air.
Then Trump told reporters that networks are “not allowed” to focus criticism on him. His increasingly dictatorial rhetoric and actions have gotten so brazen that even some MAGA folks are getting alarmed.
In recent days, top White House officials have issued threats to prosecute philanthropist George Soros as well as foundations and advocacy organizations that Trump and his underlings lump together under the dishonest label “the radical left.”
Sadly, there’s more. Standing in front of the Capitol in January, Trump pledged, “Our armed forces will be freed to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.” He didn’t tell us that people in America were the enemies he was talking about, or that he would use troops to suppress dissent and terrorize immigrant communities.
Trump has abused emergency powers to mobilize the military against people living in U.S. cities in ways that are both dangerous and ridiculous.
Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles set a precedent for him to treat the armed forces as a personal militia to be trained on Americans who oppose his policies. It violated legal restrictions against deploying the military domestically except in dire emergencies.
The fictional crime “emergency” Trump declared in the District of Columbia took National Guard troops away from their families for such “urgent” tasks as hanging around tourist sites with automatic weapons and spreading mulch in city parks.
Trump lied about the extent of crime in D.C. before his expensive propaganda operation, and he lied when he declared the city “crime-free” a month later.
What else did Trump promise at his inauguration? He pledged in his inaugural address to rapidly bring down prices that were causing American families pain at the grocery store and elsewhere.
But as president, he imposed tariffs on food imports, went after farm workers and disrupted food processors. You don’t have to be an economist to know that is not a formula for making our food cheaper. Indeed, grocery prices are rising at the fastest rate since 2022.
Trump promised a new golden age of national wealth and prosperity, but in fact his policies are threatening to tank the robust economy he inherited. It is getting harder for unemployed workers to find jobs.
His deportation czar’s obsession with getting 3,000 arrests a day apparently led to the fiasco in which hundreds of Korean workers in Georgia trying to get a new factory up and running (they may have been here legally) were arrested and detained — deeply offending our Korean allies and potentially threatening future foreign investment in U.S. manufacturing.
Perhaps the biggest promise the president made, and the biggest betrayal, was his pledge to put America and Americans first in all things.
Trump has “used his power to enrich himself in ways that have little modern precedent,” in the words of a recent New York Times exposé of just one of the shady deals that have made billions for the president’s family. At the same time, his big ugly budget bill will rip health care from millions of Americans in order to provide tax breaks to millionaires.
Meanwhile, the administration’s war on science, from dismantling efforts to understand and deal with climate change to abandoning crucial anti-cancer research, has put ideology first, not Americans’ health and future.
Trump has aggressively implemented the Project 2025 agenda that he dishonestly distanced himself from as a candidate. It has meant a staggering destruction of expertise on public health and the environment. It has meant dismantling protections for average Americans from predatory banks and other financial scammers.
Trump and his collaborators are carrying out an extraordinary act of national self-harm — harms inflicted mainly on the people our president pledged to put first.
As the saying goes, a promise is only as good as the person who makes it.
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
