On CNN News Central, Keilar expressed some doubt about a two week deadline, calling “two weeks” a longtime “verbal crutch” for the president.
“We do just need to be clear here, that would ordinarily be quite a deadline, but the president says two weeks all of the time, it’s really this kind of verbal crutch that he uses that he often doesn’t mean so it’s hard to know exactly what he means here,” Keilar said.
She then ran through a number of examples.
“He’s used this recently when he’s talking about Ukraine, what to do about Ukraine and Putin, it’s going to be in two weeks, all the way back to the beginning of his term, whether it was a healthcare plan to replace Obamacare or it was his infrastructure plan,” Keilar said. “Most of these two week promises never happen. Some of them do, but not within two or sometimes the two to three weeks as he will sometimes say. He makes a lot of these Fortnite references. And so this is really tricky as we try to parse this.”
In April, President Trump told reporters he wanted a deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war in “two weeks or less.” Trump was then asked in May whether he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to end the war, and he responded, “I can’t tell you that, but I’ll let you know in about two weeks, within two weeks.”
Trump similarly used the “two weeks” model when promising a new infrastructure plan in 2017, and repeatedly in 2020 when promising a replacement for Obamacare, as Keilar referenced.