Donald Trump is learning in real time that his skills at manipulating media coverage only go so far. With his short attention span and impervious sense of his own superiority, he seems to have thought that the war against Iran would be a breeze, over as quickly as his attack on Venezuela. Trump traffics in dominance (just ask any elected Republican), and who would dare to contradict his beliefs?

As it turns out, Trump has lost control of the narrative that he started. (It didn’t help that the administration floated an endless array of mixed messages to explain its actions.) Instead of a tidy victory where he could claim success that eluded past presidents, he is now grappling with ballooning gasoline prices, allies who ignore him, and a resilient Iranian regime that has the power to choke the world’s oil supply.

Related

The midterm primaries are turning out to be really bad news for incumbents

If anything, the worst may still be to come. The shock to the oil supply has a ripple effect beyond gasoline at the pump; fertilizer, plastics, and virtually any industry that uses oil products are going to start seeing their prices jump soon, if they haven’t already. Those costs will be passed along to consumers, which will feed inflation and squeeze household budgets even more. As is, the job market is already lousy without piling more problems on top of it.

Even if Trump ended the war tomorrow, the effects of his recklessness will linger. Analysts predict gasoline prices will remain high at least through the end of the year.

Dive deeper every day

Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Just in time for the midterms.

Trump was already incredibly unpopular before he started the war. He’s compounded the problem by plunging the U.S. into a fraught situation without doing anything in advance to win public support. That makes him the first modern president to find a majority of Americans disapproving of a foreign incursion.

Moreover, the attack has exposed cracks in the coalition that brought him to power. During the 2024 campaign, Trump made a big deal about how he would never get involved in “endless” wars, a promise that lots of Trump voters took to heart. Now many of the young voters who bought that line are regretting their decision to support him.

Rising gasoline prices are only going to exacerbate the exodus. A snapshot by NBC News of one Pennsylvania Congressional district found voters there boiling with anger. “Apparently, I’m an idiot,” one woman who voted for Trump three times said.

Add to that the increasing antagonism of Latino voters toward Republicans because of Trump’s mass deportation policy, with its obvious racial profiling. Polling shows that Latino voters are deserting the GOP to swing back to Democrats.

All of these elements taken together spell disaster for the Republicans in the midterms. The party had resigned itself to losing the House, but now it could lose control of the Senate as well. Even gubernatorial races in GOP strongholds like Ohio are beginning to look like real battles.

Trump has been trying to change the conversation, to no avail. He just resurrected his spurious lawsuit against Harvard for antisemitism, and he keeps pushing the Senate to approve the noxious SAVE America Act, which would disenfranchise trans voters. Indeed, Trump clearly sees his hatred of trans people as such a winning political strategy that he tacked on even more anti-trans restrictions to the bill.

The problem for Trump is that the war overshadows everything else. Trump can’t escape the war that he started and all the consequences that he and his administration were too incompetent to plan for.

If you think that’s good news for the midterms, think again. Yes, the outlook for Democrats looks bright. But Trump is at his most dangerous when he is cornered. If he thinks that Republicans will lose Congress, he will pull out all the stops to overturn the will of voters. It’s not that he cares about the party, but about himself. A Democratic-controlled Congress would likely mean yet another impeachment for him.

In the meantime, however, Trump will continue to blunder his way through the mess he created. As he faces rising opposition to his policies, he will likely double down on them. Trump never admits defeat — especially when he is losing.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.