Trump Insists He Was Being “Sarcastic” About Major Campaign Promise

One month before the election, 70 percent of Americans felt that foreign affairs comprised either a “very important” or “extremely important” component of their vote. But as it turns out, Donald Trump’s repeat campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours” were just gas.

In an interview with Sharyl Attkisson broadcast Sunday, the president revealed he never actually intended to follow through on that.

“Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that,” Trump told Attkisson on her show Full Measure. “What I really mean is I’d like to get it settled, and I think I’ll be successful.”

It’s one of the rare occasions where Trump has actually admitted that he was wrong. But dressing up the blatant lie as a “little bit” of sarcasm is an awfully convenient way to circumnavigate blame for failing.

Trump had harped on the vow to instantaneously end the war for more than a year before taking back the White House. While speaking about the ongoing deaths of Ukrainians and Russians at a CNN town hall in May 2023, Trump claimed that he would “have that done in 24 hours.”

He amped up the proposition the next year. While debating former Vice President Kamala Harris in September 2024, Trump claimed that he would “get it settled before I even become president.”

The Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow last week to advance talks on the Ukrainian-approved ceasefire terms. Negotiators in Washington and Moscow are reportedly discussing how to divvy up assets between Russia and Ukraine to bring a close to the three-year war. Russian President Vladimir Putin and his allies have insisted that they intend to keep the land they’ve carved out of Ukraine’s borders for the Kremlin. They are also expected to stipulate that Ukraine never joins NATO, the strategic Western trade and military alliance that had promised in 2008 to absorb the Eastern European nation into its fold.

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. But the Trump White House has proved remarkably hostile toward Ukraine in negotiations to close the conflict.

During Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s short visit to Washington late last month, Trump and Vice President JD Vance repeatedly attacked the wartime leader while verbally defending Putin. In doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to America’s adversaries. In the weeks that followed, the White House ordered a pause on intelligence sharing with Kyiv and suspended military aid to the war-battered nation in defiance of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S. and the U.K. agreed to defend Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine’s surrender of nuclear weapons. The aid and intelligence resumed last week after Zelenskiy publicly apologized for getting attacked.

Speaking with Attkisson on Sunday, Trump said that it would be “bad news for this world” if Putin refused the ceasefire terms.

“Bad news for this world because so many people are dying,” Trump said. “But I think, I think he’s going to agree. I really do. I think I know him pretty well, and I think he’s going to agree.”

A top official at the Commerce Department warned in a scathing resignation letter that Elon Musk intends to get rich at the expense of rural Americans.

Evan Feinman, the former director of the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program, or BEAD, which provides grants to expand internet access across the country, condemned the efforts of the billionaire bureaucrat—who also happens to own a satellite internet constellation that might directly profit from his dismissal.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world’s richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” Feinman wrote Sunday in a lengthy email to his colleagues, obtained by Politico.

The BEAD program, overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which is housed within the Commerce Department, was granted $42.5 billion in 2021 by Joe Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to provide fast internet connection to millions of Americans. As of yet, no internet expansion projects have actually begun, though some states are closer to the finish line than others.

In a statement earlier this month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed that the Biden administration’s “woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies, and burdensome regulations” had prevented BEAD from connecting a single person to high speed internet.

Lutnick promised an overhaul of BEAD that would include “ripping out” the “pointless requirements” imposed by the previous administration, but did not specify what steps that would include, or what regulations he intended to remove.

The potential changes could offer a bigger piece of the pie to Musk’s Starlink by adopting “technology neutral” policies that will make way for the use of satellites in addition to fiber-optic cables. Starlink was expected to haul in around $4.1 billion under the existing rules but could rake in anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion if Lutnick’s changes are accepted.

Feinman seemed to agree that the Biden administration had inserted some language for “messaging/political purposes, and were never central to the mission of the program.” But he was concerned that Lutnick’s changes could set the program back even further, as three states, Louisiana, Delaware, and Nevada, are currently trapped in limbo as they await approval from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

“Shovels could already be in the ground in three states, and they could be in the ground in half the country by the summer without the proposed changes to project selection,” Feinman wrote.

Feinman was concerned that the Trump administration would undermine BEAD to turn a profit, against the best interest of rural Americans, lawmakers, or even the telecommunications industry.

He urged that officials “NOT change it to benefit technology that delivers slower speeds at higher costs to the household paying the bill.”

“Reach out to your congressional delegation and reach out to the Trump Administration and tell them to strip out the needless requirements, but not to strip away from states the flexibility to get the best connections for their people,” Feinman wrote.

Trump over the weekend invoked a sparsely used eighteenth-century law to carry out mass deportations—and, after outrage, justified doing so because we are in a “time of war.” 

On Saturday, the president used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—untouched since the War of 1812 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s—to push the deportation of more than 200 Venezuelans, claiming they were Tren de Aragua gang members. The deportations were carried out despite a court order requiring all planes carrying people deported under the law to remain in the country.  

When asked the following day why he invoked wartime powers, Trump’s answer was telling. 

“Well this is a time of war. Because Biden allowed millions of people, many of them criminals, many of them at the highest level.… Other nations emptied their jails into the United States, it’s an invasion. These are criminals, many many criminals … murderers, drug dealers at the highest level, drug lords. People from mental institutions. That’s an invasion,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One, sliding effortlessly into the unfounded, racist rhetoric that has defined his political career. 

“In that sense this is war. In many respects it’s more dangerous than war because you know in war they have uniforms, you know who you’re shooting at, you know who you’re going after,” he continued. “We have thousands of murderers that Biden in his incompetence—he was grossly incompetent—Biden and his people.… It looked like we had an autopen for a president,” he said, insinuating that Biden was using an automatic signing device for all those last-minute pardons he did rather than signing them under his own power. 

Trump’s invocation is a doubling down upon his mass-deportation mission, and setting up a crisis by openly defying the courts. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, a fellow authoritarian ruler and Trump ally, mocked the judge’s order, posting video after video of heavily armed police officers leading the returned migrants to prison.

Some Trump voters are waking up to the fact that the president’s aggressive anti-immigration politics affects them, too.

Bradley Bartell, a Wisconsin Trump voter, has been second-guessing his support for the MAGA leader since ICE agents deported his Peruvian wife Camila Muñoz.

Last month, ICE agents stopped the couple at the airport as they returned home from their honeymoon in Puerto Rico.

“Are you an American citizen?” the agent asked Muñoz.

The answer was no. Muñoz, who had been married to Bartell for two years and was caring for her husband’s 12-year-old son as her own, had overstayed her original visa, per USA Today. But the couple felt confident on their flight home since Muñoz had applied for her green card, worked on a W-2 contract, and paid her taxes.

Fearing her wedding ring would be taken from her, Muñoz took it off and stashed it in a backpack that she handed to Bartell, who “shook” as he watched the agents take her away.

“What the fuck do I do?” Bartell told the publication he thought in that moment.

Bartell voted for Donald Trump, believing that the far-right leader would crack down on “criminal illegal immigrants,” but that hasn’t exactly been the case. Instead, Trump’s mass deportation policy has expanded to include immigrants whose legal statuses are under review, even if they’re married to U.S. citizens.

Trump has based his anti-immigrant rhetoric on the falsehood that the people who have entered the U.S. are murderers and rapists, and that they are a drain on the country’s economy and government resources as unemployed migrants struggle to obtain work and housing. In reality, undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. And in 2022, approximately 4.5 percent of the workforce was undocumented, contributing to some $75.6 billion in total taxes, according to the American Immigration Council.

Overstaying the length of your permitted immigration by expired visa or otherwise is considered an administrative violation—not a criminal one.

But none of that matters under the Trump administration.

“Anyone who isn’t a legal permanent resident or U.S. citizen is at risk—period,” Muñoz’s immigration attorney, David Rozas, told USA Today.

Nora Ahmed, the legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, warned that non-citizens should assume they could be targeted during travel.

“The unfortunate answer is they have to be worried,” Ahmed told USA Today. “If you are not a citizen of the United States, and you are going through an immigration process, your first thought needs to be: How can this process be weaponized against me?”

Some of the other people who have been targeted by the immigration agency have lived in the U.S. for decades. They include a woman in her 50s who has lived in the U.S. for more than 30 years and is married to a U.S. citizen, a woman in her 30s who first came to the states as a teenager and has proof of valid permanent legal residency, a European woman in her 30s engaged to a U.S. citizen, and a woman engaged to a U.S. legal permanent resident and who has lived in the U.S. for nearly a decade, according to interviews and documents obtained by USA Today.

Earlier this month, a Trump supporter in Virginia said he was similarly reconsidering his support for the president after he was racially profiled and interrogated by ICE agents who had their guns drawn.

“I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be the things, you know, like … just go against criminals, not every Hispanic-looking, like, that they will assume that we are all illegals,” Jensy Machado, a naturalized U.S. citizen, told Telemundo 44.

The Trump administration openly defied a court order and deported a Brown University professor and kidney transplant specialist.

Dr. Rasha Alawieh traveled to her native Lebanon to visit relatives last month, and was detained on Thursday upon her return to the U.S. A District Court judge in Massachusetts, Leo Sorokin, ordered the government in a Friday evening ruling to give 48 hours advance notice before deporting Alawieh, but she was put on a flight out of the country the same night anyway.

According to Thomas Brown, an attorney who handles immigration issues for Brown University doctors, Alawieh had a valid H-1B visa, which is granted to skilled foreign citizens in “specialty occupations.” The doctor had studied and worked in the U.S. for six years prior to her rushed deportation, which took place “without any justification and without permitting [her] access to their counsel,” according to a Friday legal complaint from her cousin, Yara Chehab.

Alawieh’s lawyers filed a motion Saturday saying “that Customs and Border Patrol received actual notice of the court’s order and nonetheless thereafter ‘willfully’ disobeyed the order by sending her out of the United States.”

Sorokin then issued a second court order on Sunday saying that there was reason to believe Customs and Border Protection defied his initial ruling on purpose, saying he followed “common practice in this district as it has been for years” and ordered CBP to respond to “serious allegations” at a court hearing scheduled for Monday.

“These allegations,” Judge Sorokin said Sunday in his ruling, “are supported by a detailed and specific timeline in an under oath affidavit filed by an attorney.”

This wasn’t the only court ruling that the Trump administration openly defied over the weekend. The White House deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, alleging they were gang members, despite a court order to halt the deportations. The planes continued on to San Salvador, where their arrival was made into a propaganda video by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.

Bukele later posted, “Oopsie…Too late,” with a tears-of-joy emoji on X while quoting a news article about the court order, taking the Trump administration’s lead and blatantly disrespecting the federal judiciary. All of this sets off a constitutional crisis in the United States, as Trump’s actions are not likely to be met with punitive articles of impeachment or any other mechanism to enforce a court ruling. The U.S. is now in uncharted territory.