Trump progress on campaign vows stalls ahead of midterm season

Two of Donald Trump’s most prominent campaign promises — using tariffs to remake the U.S. economy and ending Russia’s war in Ukraine — have been stymied as his ambitious goals meet harsh reality.

The U.S. president’s loose Monday deadline for a meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy will pass without any prospect of talks, while a U.S. appeals court declared the bulk of Trump’s tariff regime illegal.

With Trump also facing court setbacks in his push to deport undocumented immigrants, he’s heading into the fall with an uncertain path toward keeping high-profile pledges in the first year of his term.

“I have the right to do anything I want to do,” Trump said last week, days before a judge’s ruling threatened the pillar of his economic policy.

The stakes are high, as Trump begins to position his party for next year’s midterm elections. He’s been unequivocal about the consequences of failing, even suggesting that losing his tariffs would be a “total disaster” for the U.S.

Tariff ruling

The appeals court on Friday ruled that Trump wrongfully cited a little-used emergency law as the basis for his global tariffs, but left them in place while the case is reviewed. But the ruling threw all international trade with the U.S. into uncertainty and chaos once again, just after the rates seemed to finally be set for most trading partners in August.

If the ruling is ultimately upheld, Trump loses not only his vision of a new U.S. economy, but the funding rationale for his one legislative achievement, the $3.4 trillion One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which cut taxes and federal spending. As a candidate, Trump promised his tariffs would also engineer a domestic manufacturing renaissance as part of his MAGA revolution.

“So it was a bad decision. But the good news is, the dissent was very, very strong,” White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures of the 7-4 decision. “I think it provides a very clear road map to how the Supreme Court can certainly rule in our favor.”

Still at war

Trump repeatedly promised during the 2024 campaign that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war “on Day 1,” citing what he considers his legendary dealmaking abilities as well as his warm rapport with Putin.

Over the eight months of his presidency, Trump has berated Zelenskyy and cajoled Putin to come to some sort of agreement to end the war. He even granted Putin, considered a pariah among Western U.S. allies, the red-carpet treatment and a summit in Alaska.

Putin left Trump with the impression that he would engage in direct talks with Zelenskyy to negotiate land swaps that might end the war, but Zelenskyy remains opposed to giving up more territory after Russia’s invasion more than three years ago. And Russian officials said shortly after the summit that no talks were in the offing.

Trump, occasionally showing frustration with the Russian leader, set a two-week deadline for Putin to agree to talks. That deadline expires Monday. The Kremlin last week unleashed one of the heaviest drone and missile assaults of the year, hitting apartment buildings in Ukraine and killing at least four children.

“Once again, this will mean that President Putin will have played President Trump,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Friday at a news conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as European leaders grow increasingly frustrated with Trump’s attempts to resolve the conflict.

Trump himself seems surprised that Putin won’t agree to the U.S. leader’s entreaties.

“We’ve had a good relationship over the years, very good, actually. That’s why I really thought we would have this done,” Trump said in an interview with the Daily Caller published Saturday.

Trump was counting on that trilateral summit with him, Putin and Zelenskyy to secure the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted. Instead, Trump repeatedly highlights the multiple wars he says he has been instrumental in solving, even working to persuade leaders of conflicts, such as the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, to nominate him for the award.

“President Trump has achieved more in his first eight months than any other president in modern history,” White House spokesman Kush Desai. “The president and his administration will continue to deliver for the American people.”

Immigration, anti-crime moves in contention

A number of Trump’s priorities are also in contention, with courts this weekend adding to the judicial pushback against his deportation efforts.

Late Friday, a judge blocked the administration from using so-called expedited removal on undocumented immigrants who have been in the U.S. for a while. On Sunday, another judge blocked it from deporting Guatemalan children without due process. Other cases are pending.

After Trump commandeered the DC National Guard and assigned other federal agents to address crime in the capital, Democratic governors of states where he has threatened to do the same are opposing him, potentially setting up even more court battles.

Trump’s approach also risks undermining campaign pledges because the states in his crosshairs include metropolitan hubs with large minority populations — groups he suggested would benefit from his second-term policies. In July, the unemployment rate for African Americans spiked above 7%, a level not seen since the US was emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pitfalls ahead

With the two major pillars of his presidency in doubt, Trump plans to travel to the U.K. in September for a state visit. He will also address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where he remains one of few world leaders fully backing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel presses its offensive in Gaza.

Trump may face another major defeat if his effort to fire Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook over allegations of mortgage fraud, part of an avowed campaign to pack the Fed with loyalists who will do his bidding on interest rates, is stopped. She has sued, and the Supreme Court has suggested that firing officials from the independent Fed board may be more difficult than his dismissals of other agency leaders.