No one has ever accused President Donald Trump of being understated, so it came as no surprise when his press briefing about the war in Iran on Monday was littered with superlatives.
“We’re winning very decisively,” Trump told the reporters assembled at his private club in Miami. “We’re way ahead of schedule. It’s — our military is the greatest in the world, with the greatest equipment and the greatest people in the world. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”
By now, a decade into the Trump era of national politics, this likely doesn’t surprise you. In fact, you can probably hear him saying it in your head, envision him doing his accordion hands. It’s all so familiar, in fact, that you probably skimmed right past what I’d offer is the oddest assertion buried in all of that hyperbole.
The war in Iran, we are told, is “way ahead of schedule.” There’s … a schedule? And we are apparently ahead of it? What?
To understand this, we should talk not about troop deployments in the Middle East or the machinations of multi-starred officers in the Pentagon. Instead, we should talk about a skating rink in Manhattan.
Specifically, a rink that Trump himself talks about a lot: Wollman Rink, in Central Park. Back in the 1980s (as Trump has told crowds at campaign rallies repeatedly), the city of New York was trying to renovate the facility for public use but kept seeing contracts collapse and timelines get obliterated. So, eventually, they hired Trump. And he got it done (imagine the accordion hands here), quickly and inexpensively.
At one point, The New York Times ran a story about city contracts that told the story of Trump’s success — a front-page story, mind you! — which ended with a former official offering tongue-in-cheek advice for getting projects done: “Let Donald Trump build everything.”
As a developer, coming in ahead of schedule was presumably always a focal point of Trump’s efforts, an indicator of success. In the Wollman case, it was also a mark of exceptionality.
“We’re going to deliver the greatest American comeback in history,” he said at a rally that fall. “That’s what we’re doing. And we’re way ahead of schedule.”
In 2015, Trump transitioned into a new field: politics. He announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, leveraging the business genius persona that had been boosted dramatically by “The Apprentice.” A recurring theme in his pitch? That he brought in projects ahead of schedule.
“It’s going to be incredible. We’re actually under budget and ahead of schedule,” Trump said at an event in Chicago in late June 2015, talking about a development in that city. “Does the government ever say that, ‘under budget and ahead of schedule’?”
Well, not often, since building things is typically a very small part of what the federal government does. But then Trump won the presidency, and suddenly the government was saying it a lot.
Reducing regulations, Trump said about three weeks after he first took office in 2017, was “way ahead of schedule.”
Building a wall on the border with Mexico was “way, way, way ahead of schedule,” he said at a conference a few weeks later. He added one small qualifier: “It’s going to start very soon.”
His administration was “ahead of schedule in so many ways when it comes to education,” he said in March 2017. On reforming veterans care, later that month, Trump said things were moving “I can say honestly ahead of schedule.”
At an event in April 2017, Trump combined his affinity for being ahead of schedule with another of his verbal tics: a refusal to admit that he misspoke.
“I love to hear the words ‘under budget’ and ‘under schedule,’ right?” he said. “We used to call it ‘ahead of schedule.’ Now we say ‘under schedule.’”
He doesn’t appear to have ever said “under schedule” again, but he’s said “ahead of schedule” more than 150 times since. Among the things he boasted were “ahead of schedule” during his first term in office: growth in gross domestic product, moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, discussions with North Korea about eliminating its nuclear weapons, the increasing price of soybeans, India’s lunar program. In February 2019, Trump praised Colombia for being ahead of schedule in its effort to eliminate illegal drugs. Two months later, he declared that the country was “ahead of schedule a little bit” on curtailing drug smuggling into the U.S. Over the next year, overdose deaths soared. That was in part due to the coronavirus pandemic. When it first emerged, Trump trotted out a familiar line in support of the idea that he was on top of things: The response was ahead of schedule. The hospital ships that were being dispatched were arriving ahead of schedule. Loans to small businesses were being disbursed ahead of schedule. The development of therapies and “cures” was “way ahead of schedule.” “I think we’re way ahead of schedule, in terms of numbers,” Trump said in late March 2020. He was referring to total cases, a figure that also would soon balloon. In April, he boasted that the country would be reopening ahead of schedule after widespread shutdowns. This was a pronouncement that was more accurate than most. The only problem was that medical experts recommended a slower reopening pace in order to protect lives. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Trump justifiably boasted about the rapid development of a vaccine to combat the virus, a rare example of something that was actually ahead of schedule — and an unusual example, since there obviously was a schedule. But he also boasted of a lot of much more vague schedule-beating. “We’re going to deliver the greatest American comeback in history,” he said at a rally that fall. “That’s what we’re doing. And we’re way ahead of schedule.” When he returned to the White House in January 2025, he brought this tic with him. The plan to fire federal employees was ahead of schedule in March 2025, and bringing gas prices down was ahead of schedule a month later. Passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was ahead of schedule in May and then again in July. In October, the country learned that Trump had authorized the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the first step in a massive project aimed at building a ballroom for official events. This would be a $200 million project, the White House website assured Americans, and — sure enough! — would be completed ahead of schedule. “It’ll be under budget, ahead of schedule,” Trump said in March. “It’ll be $400 million or less.” The project was delayed after preservationists sued to keep it from moving forward. But when a “schedule” exists solely as a rhetorical device, an abstraction that the president can be ahead of, such delays get shrugged aside as easily as a doubling of the budget. The important thing is that both the ballroom and the war in Iran are in the capable hands of the guy who overhauled a skating rink in Central Park. And both remain eternally ahead of schedule, by definition.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
