It’s nice to see the president belatedly acknowledge reality, even if he sacrificed irreplaceable American political capital on the world stage to get there.

If we were to itemize every time Donald Trump promised to end Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine “on day one” during the campaign, we could be here all day.

“If I’m president,” Trump told CNN in spring 2023, “I will have that war settled in one day. Twenty-four hours.” Indeed, Russia’s adventurism “would have never happened” if he were in office in February 2022. Negotiating an end to the conflict would be “so easy to do” that Biden’s refusal to do just that could only be a product of malice or incompetence. “It can be negotiated within 24 hours,” the once and future president mused. “And there are things you can say to them, which I won’t reveal now, which will guarantee that this war will end immediately.” Trump was, at one point, so confident in this outcome that he said he could have that war “settled before I even become president.”

Perhaps this was one of those occasions in which enlightened Trump observers understand that the president should be taken seriously rather than literally. Or maybe he was being literal in the absence of seriousness. The rules of that game change so frequently that it’s hard to say. Either way, we were all wrong. As the president told Time magazine reporters in an interview published Friday, when he endlessly retailed his intention to end Russia’s war, he was only speaking “figuratively”:

Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point, and you know, it gets, of course, by the fake news [unintelligible]. Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest, but it was also said that it will be ended.

That’s surely a comfort to those who seek to preserve in their minds Trump’s image as a great deal-maker, but it’s bunk.

In word and action, the incoming Trump administration was so serious about seeking a rapid negotiated solution to the war that it dispatched the transition team to sit down with Joe Biden’s National Security Council with that explicit intention. “Trump is really serious about wanting to get to a ceasefire on day one,” a source close to the process told NBC News.

Moreover, we know the terms that Trump would offer to Russia and attempt to impose on Ukraine because they were publicly reported a year ago. As the Washington Post reported last April, the president would “push Ukraine to cede Crimea” and other territories Moscow had seized by force. That looks a lot like the outlines of the current peace plan as envisioned by the Trump administration, even if the present iteration of the deal includes many more sweeteners for Russia, including “de facto” control of all the territories seized by force and sanctions relief.

Now we’re to believe it was all a joke — a “jest,” in the president’s words. That’s a neat trick. At the time, those of us who deemed Trump’s rhetorical bombast and the policies that flowed from it a joke were mocked and chided by the president’s defenders. Observers of this conflict — those who are curious enough to know the first thing about it — understood that it was too complex to be resolved that quickly. Indeed, it seemed unlikely that a durable cease-fire was even possible given the degree to which both sides of the conflict seemed confident that they could augment their leverage with gains on the battlefield. We were told that we didn’t appreciate the acumen that the president and his team would bring to the negotiating table.

The president and his allies weren’t joking then, and they’re not joking now. As the Post’s David Ignatius reports, “His team has been intently focused on Ukraine this week.” After all, “His aides want to deliver a much-needed win for a president bruised by the tariff fiasco.” Indeed, smuggled into the peace plan is a provision that would cede U.S. control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant — a post that would install U.S. nuclear engineers and, presumably, a force aimed at protecting them on the frontlines of the conflict on the Dnipro River, the free navigation of which will have to be maintained by some independent force. If you squint, you might see in that what Ignatius describes as an “American ‘tripwire’” that would deter Russia from future assaults on that position — something the president and his supporters maintained, and still insist, is off the table.

Ignatius is right insofar as that does have the feel of a serious peace plan, albeit perhaps one that is not sufficient to mollify all interested parties and actually secure peace. But that is a sharp departure from the rhetoric on the campaign trail. Indeed, now we are to believe that all that talk and the actions that accompanied it were only ever supposed to be a joke.

You’ll find plenty who will insist that this was the plan all along, if only to avoid confronting their cognitive dissonance. That’s to be expected; vindication is a lonely place. It is, however, nice to see the president belatedly acknowledge reality, even if he had to sacrifice a lot of irreplaceable American political capital on the world stage to get there.