No one would claim that the Iran War has been a political godsend for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But some Israel-First conservatives are willing to say—and lately have been incessantly saying—that the Iran War hasn’t been a political scourge.
Those Israel-First conservatives are wrong, even if the devil is, at least partly, hidden in the details. The Iran War has damaged Trump’s approval ratings, consumed his presidency, and darkened the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.
A chief proponent of the argument that Trump hasn’t suffered all that much from the Iran War is Ben Shapiro of the Daily Wire. Shapiro’s political analysis is plainly motivated by the fact that he was a loud and influential proponent of the war who promised—falsely, as it turned out—that Iran couldn’t close the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for the global energy trade.
These days, Shapiro seems to be implicitly acknowledging the war is very unpopular while trying to argue this fact has nothing to do with the declining approval ratings of the president who launched it. We should thank Shapiro, for he has expressed his new argument in such a way as to help us uncover those devilish details that make the Iran War a not-entirely-straightforward story of political calamity.
“There’s an op right now to pretend that the real reason for President Trump’s unpopularity is foreign policy, but that is not true, by the polling data, it is not true,” said Shapiro on a recent episode of his podcast. “The reality is that Americans have affordability concerns, President Trump came into office saying he was going to alleviate the affordability concerns. He has not in fact alleviated the affordability concerns, and therefore, his polling numbers have consistently slid since Liberation Day.”
This is a bit like me saying my wife isn’t mad at me because of the drinking, but because I drunkenly crashed the car.
The Iran War, as everyone now knows, has driven up prices at the pump—prices which, unfortunately for Trump, are prominently displayed on every major street across the country. On the eve of the war, regular gasoline averaged $2.98 per gallon. Today, at the time of writing, the average price is $4.48. Americans are notoriously averse to high gasoline prices and tend to punish presidents over the issue, sometimes even when the president can’t justifiably be blamed.
But make no mistake: Virtually every sentient adult understands that 1) oil comes from the Middle East, 2) Trump started a big war in the region, and 3) gas prices shot up right afterwards. And again, even if Americans didn’t grok the connection between the war and the gas-price spike, the latter would still have hurt Trump politically, and it would still be a knock-on effect of the former.
It’s not just prices at the pump that have gone up because of the war. Groceries and other consumer goods travel across this vast land on tractor-trailers that run on diesel and get a lot fewer miles per gallon than even your Uncle Larry’s F-350. Diesel prices have smashed records and now sit at around $6.50, up from $3.76 before the war.
No wonder truckers are furious, prompting rumors of an imminent strike.
And no wonder the Iran War has contributed to general inflation in America. Anyone who has been reading the official economic reports knows the war is responsible for more than a third of recent inflation.
Before the war, inflation was trending down, only a couple ticks away from the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. It seems likely that Trump, if he hadn’t started his dumb war in the Middle East, would have garnered praise for presiding over declining inflation and that the Fed would have cut interest rates, juicing economic growth. Instead, inflation now sits at 3.4 percent.
(As an aside, this weekend I traveled to Istanbul, where many Middle Easterners of various nationalities complained to me that Americans only oppose the war because of the gas prices. That’s simply not true. The war has been unpopular since day one, when all that Americans knew was the American-Israeli strikes had killed Iranian leaders including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.)
Shapiro, ever the neoconservative, insinuated in the quote above that the decline in Trump’s approval rating owes more to his tariffs than to his war. The data doesn’t back that up, as the conservative commentator and election analyst Ryan Girdusky noted on X in response to new survey data. “The most eye opening part of this poll is that Trump’s approval rating and the strength of the economy went up right after Liberation Day,” Girdusky said. “Fell slightly afterward and then plummeted at the start of the Iran War.”
Shapiro has unwittingly helped uncover another, subtler, way in which the Iran War has indirectly damaged Trump’s approval ratings and, by extension, the Republican Party brand. Shapiro recently went on Fox News to commiserate with the host Mark Levin—another Israel-Firster and warmonger—over all those dastardly antiwar conservatives blaming the Iran War for everything.
“Iran is a 4-percent issue with the American people,” Levin said, as Shapiro nodded in agreement. Levin was referring to Fox News polling that shows not many Americans name the Iran War as their top issue. “So, whatever happens in the midterms, it doesn’t appear that Iran’s going to drive anything one way or another.”
“I think that’s exactly right,” Shapiro replied.
Part of the problem with Levin’s analysis has already been covered above. In the Fox poll, a plurality of Americans—34 percent—named the cost of living as the most important issue, and the Iran War has made living costlier.
But the subtler problem is perhaps even more illuminating. Simply put, Americans believe Trump is too focused on foreign policy at the expense of the problem they really care about, which, in fact, his Iran War has exacerbated. This is a PR disaster for the Trump administration and the GOP. Americans don’t prioritize the war that has dominated the headlines and distracted the White House, even as Trump claims to have boldly prevented Iran from unleashing nuclear apocalypse.
It may be grotesque to find silver linings in this dumb and deadly war, but here’s one: Americans no longer buy the war narratives. That is certainly not, however, a silver lining for Republican candidates in this year’s election, no matter how cynically they try to distance themselves from the war. In fact, it’s a good bet they’ll do much worse than if Trump hadn’t launched this unnecessary war, despite what Shapiro and his ilk may tell you.
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