What did Donald Trump do today?

He quietly admitted he'd been lying about his recent promises before making dozens more.

Much of the political news tonight dealt with Trump's address to Congress, which was mostly the same litany of grievances and agitation he's been reciting in political speeches since returning to the campaign trail. It would take far longer than the 100-minute speech to unpack why virtually all of it consisted of lies, and for that reason it arguably isn't even worth trying to do, although some instant debunking is available here and here.

Trump came into the speech with abysmally low approval ratings, reflecting voter anger at everything from his terror campaign against American cities to his botched trade war to his tenuous mental health. In an attempt to turn that around, his speechwriters put promises of better times in his mouth. Among other things, he pledged to abolish (or at least "substantially replace") the income tax and to abolish the health insurance by giving Americans a one-time cash payout of a few thousand dollars to buy health care on the open market. (As usual, he neglected to say how this would cover, for example, the $20,000 hospital sticker price of a routine pregnancy.)

The fact that Trump is neither able nor even necessarily willing to do these kinds of things isn't the point. Instead, they're a form of political insurance: Trump and his handlers hope that the promise will make him popular in the short term and be forgotten in the long term. That's also why Trump promoted policies he doesn't actually support, like forcing AI companies to pay premiums on the electricity they use to prevent rate spikes for residences. Trump is heavily indebted to the extremely precarious AI sector, and has been cutting sweetheart deals for it since returning to office, including killing what few regulations governed it in the first place. But by coming out theoretically in favor of a bill that would cost these companies real money, Trump hopes to give himself political cover in the meantime.

It's the same strategy he employed with the bill requiring the release of the DOJ's Epstein documents. When the winds shifted late last year after months of stonewalling calls to release the documents he'd campaigned on releasing, and Congress presented him with a near-unanimous bill requiring him to do that, Trump insisted he'd wanted to all along—and then continued to not do it. Today, news broke that many documents that did implicate Trump in wrongdoing have been silently removed from the public release. 

That was one of several stories, just from today, of Trump backpedaling on recent flashy promises or threats. His administration also admitted today that the medical ship he'd said was already "on the way!!!" to Greenland, as a result of a tantrum this past weekend over an American sailor getting medical help from Denmark's military, would not be going at all and had never left port.

He even backed down today on the extra five-percent flourish he'd added to his recent attempt to impose a legally valid tax on imported goods: in the wake of last Friday's Supreme Court ruling striking down most of his tariffs, he declared that Americans would have to pay 10% on all foreign goods, and then the next day—without offering any explanation—insisted that he'd decided it should be 15% instead. Today, it went into effect at the original 10%.

Why does this matter?

• It's still wrong to lie, even if nobody really believes you anymore. 

• Presidents who have good ideas that anybody likes, and the mental energy to follow through on them, don't need to lie about getting things done.