What did Donald Trump do today?

He said a central campaign promise was a joke.

Trump seemed to have regained some of his emotional equilibrium today at a NATO summit in the Netherlands. Part of the reason may have been some gentle manipulation by the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who is currently serving as NATO's Secretary General. Rutte wrote Trump a fawning letter in advance of the meeting—which Trump promptly posted to his microblogging site—which is generally being interpreted as strategic flattery of the sort Trump is known to be susceptible to.

If so, Rutte's letter did the trick, with Trump sounding much more upbeat about NATO than he has in previous years when he treated it as a protection racket with the United States in the role of the mob boss. But his good mood evaporated when he was asked about the Russia-Ukraine war:

REPORTER: You once said that you would end the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. You later said that you said that sarcastically—

TRUMP [angrily] Of course it was sarcastic.

REPORTER: But you've now been in office for five months and five days. Why have you not been able to end the Ukraine war?

TRUMP: Because it's more difficult than— people would have any idea.

There are two lies here. First, Trump appears to be the only person who thought it wouldn't be difficult to end that war, which he has tried to do by switching the United States' side in the middle of the conflict to align with the Putin regime.

The second lie is about Trump's campaign promises about ending the war "within 24 hours" or "on Day One" or even "before I even arrive at the Oval Office" being sarcastic. They were delivered over and over again in all apparent seriousness. CNN's Daniel Dale catalogued at least 53 separate examples taken from a partial database of Trump's public remarks. As Dale put it:

It’s sometimes hard to determine the intent of a politician’s one-time ad-libs, but this was no jovial ad-lib. Rather, the promise of a rapid end to the war was a sober staple of Trump’s pre-written rally remarks. He framed the promise as a key component of his second-term agenda, and he justified it with claims about his “credibility” as a leader, his history as a “peacemaker,” and his knowledge of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  

Other times that Trump has claimed he was "joking" after saying things in all seriousness include:

• when he said he'd give pardons to people who broke the law for him (in this case, related to the border fence he'd promised to build) 
• when he compared himself to Jesus not once but twice in one week 
• when he said that President Obama, whom he'd falsely said was a foreign-born Muslim, was the founder of ISIL 
• when he accused Democrats of treason for not clapping for him at a speech
• when he publicly begged the Putin regime to conduct cyberattacks to help him in the 2016 election (a "joke" Russia acted on the very same day, and which he didn't reveal as a "joke" until 2019) 
• when he did the same thing except in regards to the 2020 election, this time with Putin in the room 
• when he thanked Putin for expelling American diplomats because it reduced the number of State Department employees he had to pay 
• when he said it was okay for police to deliberately beat people they'd already arrested
• when he challenged Rex Tillerson, his own former Secretary of State, to an IQ test challenge because he was angry that a Tillerson quote calling him "a fucking moron" had leaked
• when he said he wanted fewer COVID tests to be done at the outbreak of the pandemic, because more people testing positive made it harder to lift restrictions that were hurting him politically
• when he lied about having been surveilled by the Obama administration, and then tried to cover for it by saying to German Chancellor Angela Merkel that Obama had spied on her too
• the many, many, many, many, many times he said he would ignore the results of any election he lost, or that people should commit crimes to keep him in office if he did
   

Why does this matter?

• You can't turn a lie into a joke just because you got caught. 

• It's bad if the President of the United States is so easily and transparently manipulated, even if the people doing it have good reasons.