Don’t look now, but Brent crude is suddenly pushing $100 a barrel again. Happy Thursday.
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Support Our Troops by Ending Trump’s War
by William Kristol
Yesterday, President Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend the dignified transfer ceremony for the four young American soldiers killed last weekend in the war he started almost five months ago.
But Donald Trump doesn’t do dignified. And so as he departed the White House, he couldn’t resist enlisting these fallen soldiers to the cause of justifying his failing war. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”
After the ceremony, Trump flew to a political rally in Georgia. There, in the course of his rambling remarks, he called his war—a war in which eighteen service members have died and hundreds have been wounded, a war that has cost us tens of billions of dollars and that is now expanding and escalating daily—a “skirmish.”
Trump explained his use of the term: “I call it a skirmish. This skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that because let me tell you, they’re getting hit so hard, they want to make a deal. . . . They’re not ready, they’ll be ready very soon.”
Needless to say, there is no more evidence that Trump is telling the truth about the intentions of the rulers of Iran than that he was telling the truth about the views of the fallen American soldiers.
Meanwhile yesterday, as Trump was talking, the House of Representatives was voting. The House passed along party lines a budget resolution that allocated $73 billion of new spending for Trump’s “skirmish.”
So the Republican House’s final major vote before heading home for a five-week break was to fund the war.
And the war is strikingly unpopular. For example, a new Fox News survey shows only 34 percent of registered voters approving of Trump’s handling of Iran, with 66 percent disapproving. A more detailed University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll confirms that the American public wants this war to end. Fifty-two percent of all respondents—including 76 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and even 23 percent of Republicans—say that the United States should end the war with Iran now. Only 24 percent of all respondents say the United States should undertake military actions whenever the White House deems necessary.
And 58 percent of Americans say the Iran war has impacted American interests more negatively than positively. Only 12 percent of Americans say the reverse. Even a plurality of Republicans say the war’s impact has been net negative (by 32 percent to 27 percent).
The analysis of the University of Maryland survey concludes, “the public’s preference for the war to end now is divorced from any objectives the Trump administration has used as a justification. The public wants the war to end now even without achieving any unachieved objectives. . . . None of the justifications for war are landing.”
So Republicans will be going home for the August recess having to defend an unpopular war on which they have just voted to spend tens of billions more dollars. This won’t be an easy sell. And Republicans are already trailing in the generic congressional ballot—by six points in the new Economist/YouGov poll, and by seven points according to Fox News and Strength in Numbers/Verasight. In the Strength in Numbers survey, the Democratic margin increases to nine points among those who say they’ll probably or definitely vote in November. A new Emerson poll out this morning shows Democrats with an astonishing 11-point advantage in the generic ballot—something of an outlier, but one Republicans no doubt wish pointed in the opposite direction.
The August recess is often the time when the public’s judgment settles in prior to a midterm election. After Labor Day, voting intentions tend not to change much, except to continue somewhat more in the direction they’re already heading in. So August matters politically.
Democrats will have a simple and popular message that can cut through the summer heat: We want to end the war. Republicans just voted to continue it.
Republicans will claim in response that Democrats aren’t supporting our troops. But that argument will fall flat if Democrats argue that the best way to support our troops is to end Trump’s reckless and foolish war. It’s a politically strong argument. It’s also true.
Trump Is Running Out of Time and Energy
by Andrew Egger
As Bill explains above, Donald Trump could sure do with some good news on Iran. But it’s not clear when he’s going to get any. A new Politico poll finds that even his core base is getting decidedly sour on the Mideast misadventure that has increasingly defined his second term: Back in May, half the MAGA base thought the war was worth its economic costs. Now, only about a third do.
The poll comes even as the end of the conflict seems to be sliding farther and farther away, with Trump back to the “bomb the bridges and power plants” rhetoric that marked the most belligerent stage of the conflict. The Memorandum of Understanding is a dead letter, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and the president is once again puzzling away trying to figure out how to write a Truth Social post dire enough in its maledictions to get knees knocking in Tehran—despite the testimony of recent history that the Iranians are willing to read even threats of total genocide as idle bluster. And why not? They’ve been correct so far.
Even the president knows something has to change. We know he knows this, because he was telling us just a month ago. When he spoke at the G7 conference in France shortly after the signing of the MOU, Trump railed at length against his Iran-hawk critics, grumpily reminding them he needed a deal to avert global economic calamity.
“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” the president harrumphed. “We would really run out [of oil], and there would be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. And you want to see bedlam?” Trump was uninterested, he said, in associating his name with “the late, great Herbert Hoover”—in being blamed, in other words, for total financial disaster.
“If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years,” Trump said then. “You would never have the Hormuz Strait open. You would never have success. Your market . . . would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929 or whatever.”
All that remains true today. In fact, if anything, the energy situation is worse now. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that we’re suddenly staring down the barrel of a three-front energy stranglehold. As the Iran conflict spirals, it is clogging even more crucial waterways: Iran-backed Houthi militants have suddenly begun turning back oil tankers in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks continue to wreak havoc on Russian oil infrastructure, including a crucial oil pipeline in the Black Sea.
“The world goes into these disruptions,” the Journal notes, “with the lowest levels of oil reserves in years.”
The trouble is—has been all along—that when it comes to Iran, Trump has no escape hatch. He can’t get out peacefully without giving Iran even more than he’s already been willing to offer, which would mean swallowing far more humiliations than even his adoring base would be willing to accept. And he can’t get out belligerently without ordering either mass war crimes on an unprecedented scale or a ground invasion—red lines even he seems unwilling to cross.
All the bullshit and bluster aside, Trump knows he’s in real trouble here. Economically and politically, he’s running out of time.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Can’t Stop Pretending the Iran War Is Over… Just as he lied about COVID quickly going away, he insists Iran is desperate for peace. The attacks on U.S. service members and the Strait of Hormuz suggest otherwise, argues WILL SALETAN.
How the Tech Right Learned to Love Mordor… JOSHUA TAIT writes on the history of the American right’s long romance with J.R.R. Tolkien, from earnest fandom to arms-industry branding exercise.
Iran Is Going to Make Trump Eat It… On the flagship pod, DAVID FRUM joins JVL to discuss why the Iranians are not going to back down until the whole world can see that they beat Trump.
George Conway is Back! And Trump gave him plenty to work with, as he joins SARAH LONGWELL on The Illegal News.
Quick Hits
WELL, SOMEONE’S LYING HERE: How desensitized have we all become to Republicans’ politicization of every arm of government, including the Justice Department? House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan yesterday referred former Special Counsel Jack Smith to DoJ for possible criminal prosecution, the latest GOP attempt to harass and punish anybody who made life difficult for Donald Trump over the past decade, and it feels like a page-three story. Here’s the New York Times:
The criminal referral could provide a catalyst for a prosecution of Mr. Smith—in many ways the top target of the president’s campaign of retribution.
“The responses provided by Mr. Smith gave the impression that neither Mr. Smith nor his team had access to the content of members’ privileged text messages,” Mr. Jordan wrote in a letter to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who led Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team in the two federal cases brought by Mr. Smith. “We now know this to be false.”
Mr. Smith’s legal team accused Republicans of intentionally taking his answers out of context to provide an excuse to investigate him. They say he was responding narrowly to the inquiry about the toll records, not speaking more broadly about an investigation he is precluded from publicly discussing without approval from Trump administration officials.
A criminal referral is a non-binding recommendation; the Justice Department is under no obligation to pursue the matter further. And Trump’s attempts to prosecute his political enemies so far have been so fruitless and shambolic that it’s easy to start to feel more complacent about them. But those attempts are no less authoritarian simply because they’re going badly.
BLUE WAVE VIBE CHECK: The latest Fox News poll, which Bill mentioned above, gives Democrats a 53–46 advantage over the GOP on the generic congressional ballot—which, as the pollsters note, is “the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.”
The poll also suggests Trump and Republicans have lost ground with the electorate across a host of issues, with Democrats showing stronger support on issues that drove turnout for Trump in 2024—inflation (+10), the economy (+9), immigration (+1). Only on crime (+7) and national security (+1) do Republicans still enjoy a small lead.
All this is roughly in keeping with what we’re seeing from other polls lately—but it’s a bit more fun when it’s Fox News, isn’t it?
PUT ANOTHER TARIFF ON IT: It’s not exactly surprising to see Donald Trump throwing around a bunch of new tariff threats again—this is, after all, Trump we’re talking about. But many GOP strategists are fretting that Trump’s public re-embrace this week of economic gunboat diplomacy—which has featured threats of major trade action against Canada and generic drug manufacturers abroad—couldn’t be coming at a worse time for an electorate already incensed about the president’s inability to deliver on affordability. Here’s Politico:
“Everything that you do that’s not focused on affordability is not helpful. This might not be a negative five, but it’s a negative 0.5. Anything that you’re doing that is not on the plus side of the scale is a problem,” said one person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak about the impact of the tariffs on the GOP’s midterm chances. “When you announce new tariffs, it’s not like, okay, well, let’s see what they do. It’s, ‘Oh crap, those are the bad things.’”
Could Trump 2.0 so thoroughly poison the public against tariffs that we reverse-polarize back into an optimistic, prosperous free-trading future? Hey, we can dream, right?
Cheap Shots
Let me get this right. Mr Thierer is all for data centers because they provide temporary construction jobs for blue collar workers. These completed data centers will then cost millions of blue, pink, and white collar workers their jobs, put the blue collar construction workers back in a tepid construction economy, raise power costs for residents surrounding them, and eat up millions of gallons of fresh water. This is some of the most short sighted thinking I've ever seen, but then too many in today's economy seem perfectly willing to grab short term gains in exchange for long term pain. Just wait and see what happens when the tech stock market bubble bursts.
"But Donald Trump doesn’t do dignified."
Understatement of the century.