Trump never got voters to back his war in Iran — now the GOP pays the price

President Donald Trump says the Iran war will end “soon,” a promise he’s been making most of this year. 

Eventually he will be right, but it hasn’t happened in time for the midterm elections — and his party is bearing the brunt. 

If Republicans get thumped Tuesday, all the polling suggests that prices will be one of the main reasons, with the Iran war’s contribution to higher costs looming large.

According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, 65% of registered voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Iran, and almost 75% disapprove of his handling of gas prices, two closely intertwined issues.

Given the political risk, it’s remarkable how stalwart Trump has been in prosecuting the war, the brief interlude of the misbegotten Memorandum of Understanding aside.

“The quickest way of ending a war,” George Orwell said, “is to lose it” — and Trump has been loath to accept a strategic defeat as the way out of the conflict. 

That doesn’t mitigate the potential political damage.

If the Iran war had been as short as initially advertised, or if it had dragged on with no appreciable cost back home, most people presumably wouldn’t have cared very much, even if they weren’t on board. 

It’s the combination of a relatively drawn-out war causing elevated prices that’s a killer.

And it adds insult to injury that Trump has handled the matter with such high-handedness. 

He didn’t ask Congress to authorize the war, and barely made a public case beforehand, while giving the impression throughout that the entire enterprise depends on his whim. 

It’s often remarked that Trump’s obsession with naming things after himself, or building things in Washington, is hurting him because it makes him seem out of touch and interested only in his own priorities.

But none of this directly harms anyone — unless they, say, hold a season pass to the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.

The Iran war, in contrast, has imposed an economic cost on nearly everyone in the country.

This president has an idiosyncratic view of representative government.

The common understanding of our system is that we elect representatives who debate and vote on important public matters, before standing for election again and finding out if their constituents still want them.

Trump’s populist understanding is different — he’s the people’s representative.

It makes sense that Trump, who has a highly personalized view of government and of his movement, has a highly personal view of himself as the tribune of the people.

This tends to render the other representatives an unnecessary encumbrance, and indeed that is largely how Trump has treated Congress in his second term.

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that it evidently didn’t occur to him to ask Congress to authorize the Iran war.

Some have made comparisons between Trump’s war and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but this is a stark difference.

Bush went to Congress, and by the time lawmakers authorized the war, it was a matter of national consensus (although one that quickly fell apart).

Trump hasn’t gone to Congress on his tariffs, either, but he made it abundantly clear in the 2024 campaign that he intended to drastically increase duties.

Compared with that, the Iran war was a bolt from the blue.

We’ve seen ongoing efforts to cushion the conflict from public accountability.

Republicans have tried to argue that it isn’t really “a war,” and Trump has said that a renewal of a major bombing campaign will only occur after the election, an effort to keep Iran from being front and center during voting. 

Although the war hasn’t gone as planned, we need to wait to see how it turns out to make an ultimate judgment: If Trump manages to crack the Iranian regime, it will indeed be a legacy-defining achievement.  

The problem for now, though, is that you can’t expect great patience from the public when it wasn’t asked — or even informed — beforehand.

X: @RichLowry