Trump midterm losses and the Iran war, Digi Mart USA News: When Donald Trump made the decision to take the United States into war with Iran, his attention was focused more on cementing his historical legacy than on near-term elections. Flush with what he saw as a major military success in Venezuela, completed in a single night, the President apparently believed that confronting a country long regarded as a pariah by many Americans could secure his place in the history books.
The decision marked a turning point, but not the one he had hoped for. The consequences of the war spread outward from that initial move.
By summer, rising prices at gas stations and in grocery stores had dragged down not only Trump’s personal popularity but also Republican electoral prospects.
That anger made voters more focused on, and less forgiving of, other perceived missteps, including the way Trump and his family appear to have enriched themselves during his second presidency. The author reached this conclusion before the midterm results were announced this week, based not on White House reporting but on travel across the country with colleagues from the Channel 4 News Washington bureau, through Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Kansas and Michigan.
Throughout the trip, the author said, the frustration was visible everywhere, and it almost always began with personal economic pressure. In Georgia, the team worked with the research firm PF Global on a focus group assessing how people felt at that moment.
Trump remained deeply divisive in the room. When eight participants were asked to score his presidential performance, some gave him 10 out of 10 and others gave him zero, a love-hate split that was echoed in a national poll PF Global conducted.
In that poll, one in eight people gave a perfect 10, while a third gave zero.
The most telling response came from a young man with a successful IT job who now worked night shifts doing supermarket deliveries so he could still afford to take his wife and daughter out occasionally. Another man said that almost everyone he knows now has a second job.
The same concerns surfaced in Kansas, where the team also examined the factors driving the Christian vote, and again in Michigan earlier this week on the eve of the election. Voters, some of whom had backed Trump in the past, summed up their motivations in two words: gas prices.
One man quoted the well-known line from political consultant James Carville, offered to Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Alongside economic anger was shock, particularly among Hispanic voters, over an immigration crackdown that was meant to target the “worst of the worst” but instead appeared to reach their hardworking neighbors. The author witnessed people from Minnesota to Florida too frightened to leave their homes, with friends and relatives helping take their children to school and delivering supplies to them.
The author recalled covering a by-election in Hartlepool, northeast England, in 2021, where voters largely ignored sleaze allegations linked to Boris Johnson’s gold wallpaper. A politician there warned that no one cares about sleaze until something makes everyone care.
For Johnson, that turning point was Partygate. For Trump, the author argues, it was the Iran war.
Closely tied to disastrous election results, lame duck leaders also face pressure from within their own party. Republicans hoping to replace Trump in 2028 are quickly working out how to distance themselves from him.
JD Vance has suddenly distanced himself not only from the Iran war but also from U.S. links to Israel, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, long accused of driving culture-war politics, suggested such campaigning should be a thing of the past.
Many are now wondering when Secretary of State Marco Rubio will speak out.
That will not be easy for any of them. The author has seen how anger toward Trump and his policies has spilled over onto those around him, and argues that Vance, Rubio and others will not come out of this clean.
The shadow of the Iran war will be long.
Trump will remain President for another two years despite the midterm defeat. He has a proven ability to wield executive power like few others, but with less sycophancy from colleagues and more scrutiny from Democrats, the White House will likely feel far lonelier.
