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The Record

Promises

What was pledged on the campaign trail, next to what actually happened.

Standing rule: no scores. Color marks whether something is in force, reversed, contested, concluded, or permanent — not good or bad.

Unscored · 97 entries · last change 2026-08-15
New here? Read this first — 30 seconds
  • Color is a legal fact, not an opinion. It shows — whether something is still in force, was reversed, or is contested in court — never whether it was good or bad.
  • Every number links to its source and to how strongly it can be tied to the action () — click any figure to see the full evidence.
  • Nothing here is scored, graded, or ranked. When two credible sources disagree, this archive shows both numbers instead of picking one.
  • Wins are in here too. See or filter the Ledger by .
Read this before the list

Specific commitments made on the campaign trail, tracked to their actual outcome. Some of these are their own entry; most link into a broader policy entry that already documents what happened in full — the verdict shown here is read live from that entry's own standing, never a separate claim invented for this page.

This archive tracks 17 promises out of the hundreds any campaign makes — picked for how well-documented and consequential each is, not for outcome. Do not read the list below as a kept-versus-broken rate. Real promises like "drain the swamp" lobbying reform and "bring back manufacturing" as their own tracked claim are left out on purpose, not by accident — they need original research to source a clean verdict rather than borrowing one from an adjacent entry, and that's a deliberate follow-up, not a gap being hidden.

What "Kept" actually requires: a promise is only marked Kept when its outcome can't be undone by an ordinary act of a future administration — a completed treaty exit, a lifetime appointment, a settled court ruling. A policy that is currently in force but reversible by a future signature or statute — a tariff, a withdrawal, a pledge still being implemented — is marked In progress even when nothing about it has failed, because "kept" and "currently standing" are different claims. Not kept means reversed, blocked, or never delivered; Partially kept means real parts of the promise landed and real parts didn't.

Same warning, before you quote this page
Repeating it here on purpose, now that you've seen the actual list: 17 tracked promises is a sample biased toward significance, not toward outcome, so a count of how many landed in each bucket is not a batting average, and shouldn't be reported as one. Do not read this page as a kept-versus-broken rate. Doing so would be a misuse of the data, and the honest thing is to say so on the page rather than in a footnote.