US-backed forces in Syria are preparing to push ISIS out of its de facto capital of Raqqa as military leaders at the Pentagon add the final touches to the Trump administration’s new anti-ISIS strategy.

The problem? The new plan is shaping up to look a lot like the Obama administration’s plan — the one President Trump has called “stupid” and “a total failure.” According to reports from the Washington Post, the Pentagon is planning to fight the militants by taking away their territory while staying out of the Syrian civil war. Military generals have emphasized in recent days that they’re not looking to challenge the government of Bashar al-Assad, which is backed by both Iran and Russia.

This is essentially the same policy that the Obama administration pursued.

It seems almost certain at this point that Trump doesn’t actually have a “secret plan” to defeat ISIS, as he claimed multiple times during the campaign. So as we finally pull the plug on this ridiculous claim, let’s have a look back at the many times Trump promised voters a foolproof (and original) policy to take down ISIS.

May 2015: Trump tells Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren that the US has “totally messed up the balance in the Middle East.” When Van Susteren asks him what he would do, Trump replies, “I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing. Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to tell at some point, but there is a method of defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory.”

June 2015: Trump says in a meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board that he doesn’t want to reveal his plan for taking down ISIS because his political opponents might steal it.

"The problem with politics is if I tell you right now, everyone else is going to say, 'Wow, what a great idea.' You're going to have 10 candidates go and use it, and they're going to forget where it came from, which is me. But no, I have an absolute way of defeating ISIS."

November 2015: Trump tells a crowd in Fort Dodge, Iowa, that he has been avoiding questions about his plans for ISIS because he doesn’t “want the enemy to know.” He adds, “I know more about ISIS than the generals do. Believe me."

April 2016: At his official speech on foreign policy, Trump makes some menacing threats to ISIS, but again stops short from going into any details.

“I have a simple message for [ISIS]: Their days are numbered. I won’t tell them where and I won’t tell them how,” he says. “We must as a nation be more unpredictable. We are totally predictable. We tell everything. We’re sending troops — we tell them. We’re sending something else — we have a news conference. We have to be unpredictable. And we have to be unpredictable starting now.”

He repeats this message weeks later at a speech in Waterbury, Connecticut.

"We're gonna beat ISIS very, very quickly, folks. It's gonna be fast. I have a great plan. It's going to be great. They ask, 'What is it?' Well, I'd rather not say. I'd rather be unpredictable."

September 2016: Trump tells a crowd in North Carolina that his so-called secret plan to defeat ISIS was actually to demand that his generals come up with one.

“I’m going to convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction,” he says. “They will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS. We have no choice.”

October 2016: At the second presidential debate, Trump slams the “stupidity” of US foreign policy, adding that decorated Gens. George Patton and Douglas MacArthur would be "spinning in their grave" over the Pentagon’s public discussions of plans to reconquer Mosul.

"Why can't they do it quietly? Why can't they do the attack, make it a sneak attack, and, after the attack is made, inform the American public that we've knocked out the leaders, we've had a tremendous success?” he says.

April 2017: The US drops the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in its military arsenal — also known as the Mother of All Bombs or MOAB — in an anti-ISIS strike in Afghanistan. In a press conference, Trump lauds the strike as “another very, very successful mission,” but refuses to confirm if he signed off on it or if it was an independent decision made by the military.

"Everybody knows exactly what happens,” he says. “So what I do is I authorize our military. We have the greatest military in the world, and they’ve done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and that’s what they’re doing.”

May 2017: Trump says in a joint news conference with the emir of Kuwait that he will have a press conference on his ISIS plan in two weeks. It never materializes, but Trump says again during his Cabinet meeting on June 12 that there will be a press conference in two weeks on updates to the US military’s ISIS strategy. The deadline passes on June 26 without the Trump administration organizing a press conference or scheduling one.

This timeline makes clear the two worrying trends underlying Trump’s approach to ISIS. As a candidate, he largely bragged about a secret, foolproof plan that didn’t exist and, as Vox’s Yochi Dreazen and Jennifer Williams explain, couldn’t have been executed anyway. Now as president, Trump has not only continued to be reticent on his plan but seems to have clocked out from devising his ISIS strategy entirely, ceding an alarming degree of power to the military.

Neither of these approaches bodes well moving forward.

Once the US-led coalition pushes ISIS out of its strongholds in Raqqa and Mosul, the campaign against ISIS is going to take on a very different form than it has in the past three years. For one, it’s going to be a lot harder to avoid getting tangled up in the Syrian civil war as ISIS retreats into eastern Syria, where Assad’s government and its allies battle opposition forces. Tensions have already risen in recent weeks over US forces shooting down a Syrian fighter jet for the first time since the war began.

So while it’s clear that the secret anti-ISIS plan Trump promised on the campaign trail doesn’t exist (and was likely just part of his pattern of bullshitting for attention), the more important question now is whether he has a coherent strategy for leading the US into this second, even more uncertain phase of the fight against ISIS.