Trump Promised to End Two Wars Quickly. In Private, He Admits He's Frustrated.

The president has told donors resolving the conflicts has been more difficult than he thought

- Josh Dawsey & Alexander Ward

When President Trump spoke to a room of top donors at his Florida club last week, he described ending Russia's war in Ukraine as a growing frustration that keeps him up at night, people in the room said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was particularly tough to negotiate with, and wanted "the whole thing," Trump said, referring to Ukraine, according to an attendee. His comments came in response to a donor's question about his biggest foreign-policy concerns.

The war in Gaza was also notably challenging, Trump told the crowd. Finding any solution was hard because "they'd been fighting for a thousand years," he said.

When Trump campaigned to return to power, he vowed to end both of those wars diplomatically and argued that neither conflict would have begun if he was in the White House at the time. He would even end the war in Ukraine on "day one," he said.

Instead, as he passes the 100-day mark of his second term with neither conflict closer to a resolution, negotiations to end Iran's nuclear program stalled, and a trade war straining relationships with allies, Trump is finding solving the world's problems more difficult than he had thought.

"Bluster and theatrics have their role in diplomatic high-wire acts, but so do details and hard work," said Dan Baer, a former ambassador in the Obama administration who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

Trump has since said he was joking about ending the Russia-Ukraine war in record time, and that supporters know he was being hyperbolic.

Kyle Haynes, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Purdue University, said: "If he hadn't promised such things repeatedly throughout the campaign it'd be wildly unfair to criticize him for failing to achieve them. But he did."