As President Trump continues to bombard Iran, triggering violent reprisals across the Middle East, is he also blasting Republican chances for controlling Congress after this fall’s midterm elections?
Much depends on how the conflict plays out, especially how many American soldiers come home in coffins. But this fact is already clear: Trump is taking an enormous political risk, and the odds seem heavily stacked against him.
While Americans traditionally “rally ‘round the flag” when U.S. forces are in danger, that’s not happening now. In a new CNN poll, 59% of Americans disapprove of the strikes against Iran, with 41% approving. Just 12% favor sending ground troops into Iran, an option Trump has refused to rule out, while 60% would oppose that move.
The first explanation for those dismal numbers is that Trump has broken one of his most emphatic and effective campaign promises: “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars.” Video clips of him making this and similar statements are already being replayed constantly, vividly documenting his deception.
While most MAGA loyalists continue to support the president, cracks are beginning to show in his base. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from her congressional seat after breaking with Trump, condemned his war as “the worst betrayal.”
The right-wing agitator and Trump ally Tucker Carlson called the attacks “absolutely disgusting and evil” on ABC and predicted they would fracture the MAGA movement. “This is going to shuffle the deck in a profound way,” Carlson said.
This is how Trump always operates. At heart, he is a performer, given to dramatic gestures and sweeping promises that work well on the campaign trail but are poor guidelines for governing. Remember his vows to end the war in Ukraine and bring down prices “on day one”?
Confidence in his leadership continues to erode. In a Washington Post/ABC poll conducted before the Iran campaign, only 29% described Trump as “honest and trustworthy.”
Now Trump has made another promise that will be almost impossible to keep – demolishing Iran’s tyrannical theocracy and replacing it with a stable, popularly chosen government. There seems to be no clear strategy or game plan for accomplishing such an ambitious goal, and past attempts by American presidents to reshape regimes in the Middle East have all ended badly.
“Our leaders don’t seem to have learned anything from U.S. interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya,” New York Times opinion writer Megan K. Stack says. “Sure, the U.S. military can kill all the leadership. And then what?”
“Wars always are easier to start than to finish, especially when you’ve set a political goal of regime change, rather than a clearly defined military objective,” David Ignatius, the foreign affairs columnist for the Washington Post, says. “President Vladimir Putin thought he would take Kyiv in a week. Israel thought it would throttle Hamas in a few months. But wars to erase a regime don’t work like that.”
Add a third dimension to Trump’s political gamble: the potential impact of his war-making on domestic prices, especially energy. Even before the attacks on Iran, Americans were deeply distressed over Trump’s economic record, with only a 32% approval rate for his handling of inflation in the Post/ABC survey.
As the bombs and missiles fell, oil prices surged, stock markets wobbled and shipping channels closed. About one-fifth of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, controlled by Iran, and Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, warned in Wired: “The more desperate Iran becomes, the greater likelihood for it to use energy as leverage to advance its interests.”
This all adds up to a final and potentially fatal problem for the president: the growing conviction that he simply does not care about the issues that matter most to the voting public.
On the eve of his latest foreign foray, only 32% told CNN that the president “had the right priorities,” while 68% agreed that he “hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.”
Trump loves to put his name on things – the bigger and bolder, the better. Well, his name is now on the war in Iran, in huge gold letters.
• Steven V. Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be reached at stevecokie@gmail.com.