A Tipping Point at Last?
The case for thinking the Iran War means the implosion of the Trump era.
“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be so sick and tired of winning. You’re going to come to me and go, ‘Please, please, we can’t win anymore,’” – Donald Trump in May 2016.
I realize I’m showing my age, but I vividly remember the week the Iran-Contra revelations hit the news. I was a politics nerd and Thatcher-Reagan fan, and all I can say is that it was like a sudden, huge change in the air pressure. The era of Reagan’s sunny sincerity came to a swift, screeching halt. He’d lied, we all realized — which in those days, actually mattered. In a single month, he dropped close to 20 points in approval.
He recovered in due course but never completely. Something had been punctured, something essential to his brand. The same can be said, I think, of George HW Bush’s courageous decision to raise taxes in a budget reconciliation bill in 1990. It was good economics, but the betrayal of the pledge he made to the base was just too crude in the end to overcome. They had read his lips.
And so I find myself asking what happens when a president who campaigned on lowering inflation and never going to war in the Middle East … decides to go to war in the Middle East and thereby fuel inflation. What happens when a president who became his party’s nominee three times because he spurned neocon wars … turns around and embraces the regime-change war the neocons have been pushing for decades?
The Trump cult has survived so much. But this? I wonder. Those who joined MAGA for reasons other than celebrity worship have been publicly humiliated. Caldwell, Ahmari, Greene, Kelly, Carlson, Fuentes, Owens et al (in descending order of respectability) have all gotten off the train. Tucker even apologized this week! And yes, the internet and podcastland are not reality — but these people do represent a real swathe of real opinion. To realize Trump has preferred Miriam Adelson’s vision to theirs all along must burn.
That’s the first strike against MAGA: the decision to go to war at all.
The second strike is how Trump has actually conducted the war itself.
For even the most propagandistic pro-Trump outlets, it’s just unspinnable. Gerard Baker’s timeline captures the madness of it all:
Unconditional surrender. Regime change. Partnership with regime for tariffing the strait. Close the strait. Open the strait. No nukes. Some nukes. No missiles. Some missiles. Civilization wipeout. Ceasefire. War. Peace. And if all that fails, we’ll take the JCPOA.
This is the art of the deal? Please. Day-by-day contradictions, countless red lines crossed and crossed again, weird declarations of total victory, followed by even weirder threats to blow everything up again: at some point, even Goebbels would give up. Five deadlines have been set and five deadlines have passed without Iran capitulating. We are burning through munitions so fast — a staggering billion dollars a day — we’re now exposed globally. The memes are just brutal. As Tim Dillon notes, the IRGC mullahs are actually beating Trump at shit-talking. He can’t even win at that anymore. And the Lego movies! My God, the Lego movies.
And your average American can see something very fucking obvious: Trump is completely out of his depth. He went to war impulsively. He never expected the Iranians to close the Strait of Hormuz; and then they did. And he can’t re-open it. In fact, he decided to close it again. Or something. That’s left us with a choice between a global recession and higher prices … or ground troops and an open-ended war of regime change? Americans can see we’re stuck, and even Karoline “Baghdad Bob” Leavitt cannot spin it away.
Maybe a miracle will happen, and Iran will suddenly capitulate after another round of famed American “death and destruction.” Or China will lean on the mullahs to save world trade. But surely the likeliest result at this point is that Xi will not get in the way of the US making a mistake, and Trump will not send the ground troops for a deeper war. So we’ll have to find a way to sign a deal very similar to Obama’s at some point — a humiliation as delicious for Trump’s critics as it is total for the US. And who knows how long that usually arduous process could take?
Two friends of mine and early cheerleaders of the war, Niall Ferguson and Eli Lake, are bellwethers of a kind. As the war began, Niall wrote a paean to “regime alteration,” even as he acknowledged the risk of the Strait of Hormuz closing. He nonetheless wrote: “One thing I can confidently promise about the U.S.-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: It will not last long.” This week, he noted that “the consensus in prediction markets is [that the Strait’s closure] will be over by the end of May, but remember: It took Henry Kissinger more than four months to get the 1973–1974 oil embargo lifted.” The title of Eli’s new piece tries to get out in front of what’s coming: “Why Trump’s Iran Deal Is Not Like Obama’s Iran Deal.” Cope.
But even if Trump pulls this off tomorrow, and Iran blinks back, the hit to the global economy remains. The Pentagon just told us it could take six months to clear Hormuz of mines. That’s a major global energy crisis — “the biggest in history,” says the head of the IEA. And it’s not just oil; it’s also fertilizer, sulfur, helium, aluminum, and methanol. Food prices could soar. Farmers are going to be hit. And this pain will matter. In 2024, many low-info voters simply recalled the Trump boom-times before Covid, so they gave him props on the economy. But this term, inflation has gone up, growth has slowed, and the mood is more stagflationary than boom. That’s fatal to the core brand: a political Bud Light / Dylan Mulvaney moment.
Do the polls bear any of this out? Yes they do! Trump’s 40 percent floor has finally collapsed. AP found a mere 33 percent approval this week, with just 23 percent approval among Independents. On the “cost of living” — one of the key issues that elected him — he’s at 23 percent. More striking: even 31 percent of Republicans now disapprove of his performance (higher than at any point of Democratic disapproval of Biden); and in another poll, 21 percent of Republicans support impeachment. A solid majority does not believe he has the “mental soundness” to be president. No shit.
When you examine the intensity of feelings, it’s worse. In another new poll, strong disapproval is now around 48 percent, and strong approval just 17 percent. NBC News found those numbers as 50 percent and 20 percent, respectively. More salient: “Among self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, the share of ‘strong’ Trump approvers has dropped from 63 percent in January of 2025 to 38 percent today.” That’s a sea change. I think this time, it’s real.
Is Trump going to prove the naysayers wrong again? Some will rally to him regardless, but his blasphemous tweets have unnerved Christianists, and his early-morning rants on social media are making the madness more visible. In previous messes, Trump also had someone else to blame or play off — from Hillary to Mueller to Schiff to Kamala. This time, the crisis is entirely self-inflicted.
No Democrat made him go to war; no judge; no law firm; no university; and no newspaper. He did it all himself, with a little help from Bibi. And at some point, even with this genius con-man, accountability happens. It’s coming. Fast.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/a-tipping-point-at-last-874