With three weeks to go until Inauguration Day, Washington is preparing for President-elect Trump’s second term in office, adjusting their expectations to meet reality.
On the campaign trail, the president-elect made grandiose promises to voters to bring down costs quickly, to end the war in Ukraine before he even took office and to use tariffs to bolster the U.S. economy and manufacturing. But since winning the election, The Hill’s Brett Samuels reports, Trump has indicated that delivering on those promises may not be as simple as advertised.
Democrats were quick to jump on Trump’s comments, suggesting it amounted to a broken campaign promise before he even took office.
“Candidate Trump promised to lower grocery prices, but now it seems he isn’t even going to try,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) posted on the social platform X. “While champagne corks pop at Mar-a-Lago, President-elect Trump says that he can’t really lower grocery prices because it’s ‘very hard.’ Sad. It’s the start of a broken promise.”
As Trump prepares to take office, Democrats are bracing for a new — and, for them, bleak — political era.
Trump’s inauguration will represent a massive rebuke to the party, The Hill’s Niall Stanage writes in The Memo, as he is viewed by many Democrats as an actual threat to the American republic, and the voters have put him back into power handily.