This headline captures President Donald Trump and the Republicans’ midterm election problems in a nutshell: Inflation in March hit its highest level in two years as the Iran war spiked energy prices.
There is simply nothing that has happened in American politics between Trump’s epic 2024 political comeback and the Democrats’ romp in last year’s off-year elections running on an affordability mantra that would suggest voters prioritize a foreign war over higher prices. A thousand clips of Trump expressing his distaste for the ayatollahs or a hundred polls showing rank-and-file Republicans still support him do not prove otherwise.
Before the war, Trump could tout favorable inflation reports and falling gas prices. While inflation still remains well below the 41-year high it hit under the vanquished former President Joe Biden, it is markedly higher than in Trump’s first term. And because inflation is cumulative, it is harder to gain political points from the rate of inflation going down than demerits from it going up.
Public approval of Trump on Iran is running slightly below his overall job approval rating in the RealClearPolitics polling averages, and neither is good enough for Republicans in November. Democrats currently lead the GOP by 5.4 points in the generic congressional ballot, though some individual pollsters show a bigger margin.
Salvaging the Republicans’ midterm election prospects is going to require extricating the U.S. from the war in Iran while keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, whether GOP lawmakers know it (or are willing to publicly admit it) or not.
Otherwise the Democratic attack ad line that we can afford bombs abroad but not groceries at home writes itself, even if it seems a bit more hypocritical given what Biden and congressional Democrats were doing in Ukraine when inflation was running hot.
It won’t matter.
Trump risks a repeat of 2020, when he heeded bad advice from people who were never his reliable allies in the first place on Covid-19 lockdowns, destroying the economy that was his ticket to a consecutive second term. But the pandemic was outside Trump’s control and not a crisis of his or the overconfident medical expert class’s choosing. Trump cannot say the same of the Iran war.
Whatever the sins of the Iranian government, and they are real, this war was a detour for MAGA and the Republican Party. Only Trump, with an assist from Vice President J.D. Vance, can get them back on track.
That won’t be easy. Not only do the remnants of the Iranian regime get a vote, especially on waterways access, but Trump’s new media allies—who are the same as the old boss—won’t cheer his ending the war as lustily as his beginning it.
The hawks will bay for blood, demanding Trump “finish the job.” Whether that job is the rescue of the Iranian people from the mad mullahs or the death of their “civilization,” seemingly a pair of contradictory goals, will vary by the commentator and the moment.
There isn’t much evidence that anyone in the Trump administration thought much more than degrading Iran’s military capacity was a doable or finishable job in the first place, including advisers committed to “maximum pressure” on Tehran.
Avoiding an intractable forever war and further disruption of the global economy remains as imperative now as it did before Operation Epic Fury began in the first place. Only now it is much more difficult. Wars, once started, are hard to end.
Trump has succeeded on this front in the past where George W. Bush failed because he stuck to military achievable goals, cutting deals with the leaders who remain and cutting his losses before things spiraled out of control. He has never tried to nation-build, especially in the Middle East.
This is the first time Trump has flirted with something more ambitious (or foolhardy). But the administration finally seems ready for an offramp, if a face-saving one can be found.
If the conversation has not substantially shifted away from war and Iran to domestic issues and an improving economy by late summer, Republicans will pay an electoral price for high prices.
It may already be too late for congressional Republicans. But 2028, and the race for the party’s future, remain a long way away.
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