President Trump talks to reporters on board Air Force One on Monday. Historically, he has promised action or answers within two weeks, as is the case with a decision about U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
President Trump said Thursday that he will decide whether the U.S. will take military action in the growing Israel-Iran conflict “within two weeks.”
It’s a timeline he’s used many times before, dating back to his first term.
Over the years, Trump has promised action on policy issues from tax legislation to minimum wage increases to health care within two weeks. He’s hinted at conspiracy theories to be resolved and policy decisions to be revealed within a fortnight — only for his announcements to materialize months later or not at all.
Trump has used the timeframe several times in recent weeks alone, priming reporters for updates that have yet to materialize on geopolitical conflicts and global tariffs.
Take Russia’s war in Ukraine. In his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he could end the war in one day — but it has since stretched into its third year. Over the last two months, Trump has said repeatedly that various answers to questions about the war, including U.S. assistance to Ukraine, would be just two weeks away.
On April 24, he told a reporter who asked about continued military assistance for Ukraine: “You can ask that question in two weeks, and we’ll see.” He gave a similar answer days later when asked if he trusted Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had publicly criticized in recent months.
Those weeks came and went. And on May 19, when asked if Ukraine was doing enough to support U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations, Trump replied, “I’d rather tell you in about two weeks from now because I can’t say yes or no.”
Over a month ago, on May 28, Trump gave Putin another two-week deadline when a reporter asked whether he believed the Russian leader truly wants the war to end.
“I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know within two weeks,” Trump said. “We’re going to find out whether or not he’s tapping us along or not. And if he is, we’ll respond a bit differently, but it will take about a week and a half, two weeks.”
On Thursday, after Trump postponed his decision on Iran strikes, a reporter in the briefing room pointed out the pattern of delayed two-week deadlines and asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt “how we can be sure that he’s going to stick to this one.”
Leavitt acknowledged the deadlines but said the fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East “are two very different, complicated global conflicts” that Trump inherited from the previous administration and has spent “a tremendous amount of time and effort cleaning up.”
Meanwhile, the world has also been waiting on Trump’s decisions about tariffs on most U.S. trading partners — which he unveiled in April before abruptly pausing many of them to allow for negotiations, with a deadline of July 9.
Trump told reporters on May 5 that he would make a determination about pharmaceutical tariff rates “in the next two weeks,” though he didn’t comment publicly on the topic again until earlier this week, when he said tariffs on pharmaceutical imports would be coming “very soon.”
And he said on June 12 that he would notify trading partners about unilateral tariff rates within — you guessed it.
“We’re going to be sending letters out in about a week and a half, two weeks, to countries, telling them what the deal is,” Trump said.
It’s been a pattern since at least 2017
Jen Psaki, a former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden, called the two-week deadline “one of Donald Trump’s absolute favorite tactics” in her MSNBC show on Thursday.
“And most of the time, in fact almost every time, when two weeks rolls around, Trump has either completely forgotten about whatever it was he promised in the first place, or … he’s hoping people have just moved on,” Psaki said.
Here’s how some of Trump’s other two-week deadlines have played out over the years:
Tax plan
On Feb. 9, 2017, Trump said a “phenomenal” tax plan would be announced “over the next two or three weeks.”
His administration unveiled its massive tax overhaul over two months later on April 26, and Trump signed it into law after Congress passed it in late December.
Trump has since promised to extend those tax cuts — the majority of which are due to expire at the end of 2025 — through a bill that passed the House in late May and is under close scrutiny in the Senate.
Paris Agreement
During his first presidential campaign, Trump said he would remove the U.S. from the climate accord. And after he took office, he said at an April 2017 rally that he would decide its fate during the following two weeks.
On June 1 of that year, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw — which, under the terms of the agreement, didn’t take effect until early November 2020.
One of Biden’s first acts after taking office in 2021 was to re-enroll the U.S. in the agreement, a move Trump reversed by executive order at the start of his second term.
Health care
The first Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to end the Affordable Care Act, even asking the Supreme Court to overturn it in late 2020. (It rejected the lawsuit in 2021.)
Trump told Fox News in July 2020 that he would be replacing Obamacare and “signing a health care plan within two weeks,” which did not happen.
According to the health policy nonprofit KFF, while Trump did propose the idea of an Affordable Care Act replacement in his 2020 budget, it didn’t get much attention. And when Trump was asked about his Obamacare replacement plan at a September debate during the 2024 presidential campaign, he infamously replied that he had “concepts of a plan.”
Infrastructure
As president-elect in 2016, Trump promised a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program — which took years to become a reality.
He told CBS News on May 1, 2017 that his administration’s infrastructure plan would be coming in “the next two or three weeks, maybe sooner.”
But he didn’t unveil the $1.5 trillion plan until February 2018, after a series of false starts that turned “Infrastructure Week” into a long-running beltway joke.
While Trump and Democrats tentatively reached an agreement in the spring of 2019, the bill ultimately failed due to disagreements over how to fund it and a number of competing crises, from Trump’s impeachment to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Conspiracy theories
More than once, Trump has said that evidence to back up his various claims would appear in exactly a fortnight.
In March 2017, after baselessly alleging that former President Barack Obama had wiretapped his Trump Tower phone ahead of the 2016 election, Trump told Fox News: “I think you’re going to find some very interesting items coming to the forefront over the next two weeks.”
Within days, congressional leaders from both parties said there was no evidence to support Trump’s claim. Years later, in a 2019 Fox interview, Trump admitted he had made the accusations based only on “a little bit of a hunch.”
Separately, days after losing the 2020 election to Biden, Trump alleged election fraud, and immediately challenged the results in several key states. He told the Washington Examiner that he expected to succeed in “probably two weeks, three weeks.” Numerous lawsuits, investigations and audits — including ones led by Republicans — found no evidence of the widespread fraud that Trump alleged.
