A total of 14 days have passed since then. And today, the question arises: Does Trump actually understand the concept of a deadline? “I’m going to make a new deadline of about 10 or 12 days from today,” he told reporters in Scotland during a meeting with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “There’s no reason in waiting.”
Okay! So, after 14 days of the 50-day window have passed, we add 10 or — or, a word that definitely makes sense inside the construction of a deadline, a word that suggests a specific endpoint for the completion of some task or other — 12 days, giving us a total of 24 or 26 days, meaning the original deadline has been snipped in half. The ostensible reason the president offered is that “we just don’t see any progress being made.” Of course, cutting the remaining time from the 36 days he initially promised leaves less room for progress, but that’s neither here nor there.
The Trump administration has issued many deadlines in its six months, on everything from drug company pricing to the culling of supposedly subversive biomedical research grants. While some of those more agency-driven deadlines also get extended or wrenched around — like the one where schools had to eliminate DEI programs or lose funding, say — it is the tariff and Russia-related deadlines that he seems to play most freely with. Was it July 9 that was the hard trade deal deadline, or August 1? Was the war going to be over on day 1, or “about two weeks” after a May 28 statement? Who can say.
This is, obviously, a rough way to run a government. Perhaps born from his longstanding tradition of refusing to pay contractors at his various failing hotels and casinos in a timely fashion, it is of a piece with his unique version of a sort of opposite to object permanence, where nothing is real except what is directly in front of him at any given moment. Fifty days, 24 days, what’s the difference — whatever number he said just now is the real deadline, the only deadline, the one that matters, until it doesn’t.
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