It’s become the Trump administration’s favorite mantra about the war with Iran. Whatever we’re doing there — inciting a revolution, pre-empting an imminent attack, preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, weakening the country’s navy and its missile capabilities, supporting our Israeli ally or just fighting a war that Iran started decades ago because we’ve always been at war with Eastasia — we can take comfort in one thing: This war is ahead of schedule.
On March 2, President Trump assured Jake Tapper of CNN that the war was “a little ahead of schedule.” On March 9, he revised the estimate, telling CBS News that the war was “very far ahead of schedule.” And in a cabinet meeting on March 26, the president went big, saying the war was “extremely, really, a lot ahead of schedule.”
Top officials have also received the calendar invite. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, has declared the conflict ahead of schedule. So has Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war memes, who changed things up a bit, saying that the war is “on plan” and “ahead of pace.” After talks with the Group of 7 foreign ministers last week, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, said that the war was “on or ahead of schedule” (take your pick).
Claiming that a war is on schedule, let alone “ahead” of it, is an exercise in illusion, a transparent attempt to project competence, control and success. If there is a schedule, then there must be a master plan, and if we are ahead of the schedule, then the plan is working: The war must be going well. A war going according to schedule means that nothing has surprised us or thwarted our intentions; it means that we are still in charge.
And, especially important for this president: A schedule implies an end date for the conflict, which must mean that Trump is still sticking to his campaign pledge to not embark on endless wars. In this way, “ahead of schedule” translates, loosely but conveniently, to “America first.”
This expression is a tic of Trump’s real-estate background. In his first memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” the man who would be president constantly bragged about how various projects of his were “ahead of schedule” (typically paired with “under budget”). But Trump was never above deceiving people about the speed of his work or the rigor of his schedule. In the book, he tells of an instance when he instructed a crew to drive machinery back and forth on a construction site in Atlantic City so that the board of directors, which was visiting that day, would think the job was well along. “If necessary,” Trump told a supervisor, “have the bulldozers dig up dirt on one side of the site and dump it on the other.”
That’s one way to stay ahead of schedule.
Late in his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump took time to open the Trump International Hotel in Washington. “My theme today is five words: ‘under budget’ and ‘ahead of schedule,’” he said. “We don’t hear those words too often in government, but you will.”
Promise made, promise kept: We’ve heard those words plenty.
Just weeks into his first term, Trump bragged that the wall at the southern border was “way ahead of schedule, way ahead of schedule — way, way, way ahead of schedule.” A few months later, he promised that new aircraft carriers would be built ahead of schedule. Trade deals were getting done ahead of schedule, he said. Even the economy was recovering ahead of schedule, Trump said during the Covid pandemic, as if the United States followed a Soviet-style five-year production plan — and we were beating it.
The pandemic was the occasion for a legitimate ahead-of-schedule accomplishment by the Trump administration. “We have vaccines,” the president asserted in August 2020. “You’ll be reading about them very soon, way, way ahead of schedule.” Operation Warp Speed delivered, surpassing the standard pace of vaccine development by several years, an extraordinary achievement at a critical moment.
In his second term, however, the schedules have become devalued and perplexing. Trump has stressed that the construction of the White House ballroom — a slightly less historic feat — is ahead of schedule, even though the plans seem in flux. (“We just got these in from the architects,” Trump said on Sunday night, showing fresh designs. On Tuesday, a federal judge in Washington ordered construction stopped for now.) In early February, he said that “what’s happening with our economy” is “years ahead of schedule,” and that the Dow Jones industrial average had hit 50,000 “three years ahead of schedule.” (I, for one, would love to receive the schedule for stock market movements just a day or two in advance.)
Trump’s ahead-of-schedule fixation traces back to his rapid completion of the Wollman ice rink in New York’s Central Park in the 1980s, Philip Bump, an MSNow journalist, has written. Bump counts more than 150 occasions of Trump invoking the ahead-of-schedule benchmark as president, spanning everything from reforming health care for veterans to making progress on education, broadly speaking. So it should surprise no one that the war in Iran is now ahead of schedule, too.
The Trump administration’s various timelines for this war have been erratic. When the war began, the president said it could last “four to five weeks,” which is where we are now. In mid-March, he said he knew it would be over “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.” On March 20, Trump stated that he was considering “winding down” the war because the United States was “getting very close” to completing its objectives. Trump’s constant threats to strike Iran’s power plants unless Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz keep moving, too: First, 48 hours, then five days, then another 10 days, to the point that any schedule, and any threat, becomes meaningless.
On Tuesday night, the president said that “we will be leaving very soon,” in a matter of two or three weeks. That would push us beyond Trump’s initial timeline. Does that mean the administration is behind schedule?
Not at all. Because Trump has also said that, in a sense, the war is “already won.”
Past American wars conjured up their own illusions. During Vietnam, U.S. officials often used enemy body counts as a proxy for progress: If they are dying, we must be winning. (General William Westmoreland famously saw “the light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam in late 1967, a light that was quickly extinguished by the shock of the Tet offensive just a few months later.) In Afghanistan, all sorts of metrics were cited to show progress during two decades of war. Many of them — such as the growth and training of the Afghan security forces — proved imaginary. Hegseth likes to tally the thousands of Iranian targets destroyed, a tactical report masking strategic drift.
In Iran, the schedule is our most malleable illusion; in a war with shifting goals, any schedule is as good as any other.
On Monday, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said that Trump “has always stated” that the timeline for the war was four to six weeks, squeezing one more week into the president’s initial estimate. And on Tuesday morning, Hegseth suggested that the president’s competing timelines are a deliberate obfuscation. “He’s said four to six weeks, six to eight weeks, three — it could be any particular number,” he explained. “But we would never reveal precisely what it is.” Whatever it is, though, Hegseth assures us that we are “well on our way” to achieving U.S. goals in the war.
In this context, professing to be “ahead of schedule” on “any particular number” of weeks is simply an attempt to manage the news cycle, to influence markets, to win the meme war, to mend a fracturing political coalition. Whether this war lasts a few more days or weeks or months, the president will always claim it was ahead of schedule.
I can feel it in my bones.
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