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On Monday, Trump will be installed as president, so naturally everyone is speculating about what he will do once he gets the keys to the White House. Interestingly, much of the speculation is around the foreign policy issues he inherits. The neocons in the media are working hard to keep Ukraine in the news, so they are making claims about what Trump will and will not do with Putin. The Israel lobby wants Israel to be number one, so they are focusing on Iran.

What does not get noticed is Trump was elected on domestic issues. In the last election, Israel and Ukraine were far down the list for all voters. The number one issue was the economy. Immigration was the next big issue. The typical Trump voter looks at Ukraine as a boondoggle and Israel as an unsolvable problem. Logically, these two issues should be far down the list for Trump, but the media is focusing on them, which speaks to the power of their respective lobbies.

The first hint of what Trump has in mind for Ukraine came last month when Trump’s personal envoy to Ukraine and Russia said that it will take one hundred days to get a deal with Russia over Ukraine. This was a big shift from prior claims about Trump ending the war in a few days. Kellogg has also shifted with regards to what is happening in the war. The business about there being a stalemate has been dropped in favor of an acknowledgment that Ukraine is in trouble.

What the “one hundred days” tells us is Trump is not going to litter his first one hundred days with the Ukraine matter. It is a custom to assume that the first one hundred days of a new administration set the tone, so it is not an accident that Kellogg was suddenly using that phrasing. It is a signal that the Ukraine matter is not in the list of items that will take up the president’s time starting in January. To whom it was a signal is not all that clear and whether they understood it is unknown.

Time is the way to think about what Trump is planning for his second term. He has just one term and that means he has about eighteen months to get his domestic agenda pushed through Congress and the administrative state. Once we get to the summer of 2026 his party will be busy throwing the midterms. This means they will not pass anything the people want but instead focus on angering the base. After the election, Trump will get nothing from Congress.

This is a lesson Trump learned the hard way the first time. Once he won the election, he was swept up in a series of events that forced him to use his time in ways that had no benefit to him. He became the salesman wasting his days tending to customer service issues, rather than finding and closing new business. The number one skill for a salesman is time management. If you fail to manage your time, you fail. This is true for presidents, especially reformers like Trump.

It is why the signs point to Trump being something of a do-nothing president with regards to foreign policy issues. With Ukraine, he can do nothing, and it will resolve itself, as far as Trump is concerned. He inherited an unsalvageable mess from Biden, so no deal is better than any deal. Spending any time on it is a waste, so the one hundred days will probably turn into forever. The post-war deal with Russia will be left to the governments of Europe and the EU.

As for Israel, the signs are there for a delaying action. Kellogg was asked about it and reiterated the usual lines about pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program, which they largely did long ago. Michael Waltz, the new national security adviser, seems to get his opinions on Iran from Fox News. One suspects that he was picked because he will do what the boss says. Despite talk of new sanctions, Trump remains opposed to a war with Iran, or an Israeli war with Iran.

Another signal that the Middle East may be down there with Ukraine on the priority list is the fact Trump has signaled his disdain for Netanyahu. He was not invited to the inaugural and Trump has tweeted some untoward things about him. He also posted a link to Jeffrey Sachs calling Netanyahu a “deep, dark son of a bitch”, which is not the sort of thing you say about your friends. Trump has also been clear about wanting out of Syria, especially now that it is in chaos.

What may be shaping up for the first half of the Trump term is a policy of doing nothing with regards to the foreign policy hotspots. Trump and his advisors can answer questions and make the usual noises, but when it comes to investing time, the scarcest commodity Trump possesses, the administration will be stingy. These issues will get the absolute minimum amount of time and only so that they do not become a time waster for the domestic agenda.

It is looking like Trump learned that the most important card any president can play in politics is his attention. There is not much anyone can do if Trump simply de-prioritizes Ukraine, for example. “We are looking into it” works just as well against the schemers behind things like Ukraine as it does his own voters. Perhaps this time, instead of saying this regarding domestic issues, Trump will be saying it regarding foreign policy, to focus on the issues that matter to him.

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