Foreign-policy failures, economic strain and rising prices threaten the President ahead of November’s polls.
The American midterms are not far away and US President Donald Trump will be heading into them with more defeats than victories to show in his foreign policy, more failures than successes on the economic front too as high process remain a worry and fights on the tariff front in which the Supreme Court has reined in his impulsive forays into trade wars.
No recent President’s ratings have been lower than Mr Trump’s in his second term, which has led him into revealing his fears that he could be impeached and even imprisoned if he loses the midterms. As the only US President to be impeached twice — only to be acquitted by the Senate — Mr Trump knows what risks the November polls carry for him much more than even his party.
While such a doom scenario is unlikely to fructify because the Republicans may still hold on to a slender majority in the Senate as the seats heading to midterm polls are mostly from Red states, it is, however, certain that the grand old party may lose its narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
The setbacks have been more prominent in his 15 months in office after he returned to the White House in January 2025 with the promise of playing global peacemaker. He seemed preoccupied with making claims for the Nobel Peace Prize as he kept averring that he had brought the Gaza war to an end and boasted of stopping India and Pakistan from escalating exchanges into a full-blown war.
Mr Trump’s greatest folly, especially for a self-confessed peacemaker, was to agree to wage war against Iran on the prompting of his friend Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Since his February 28 launch of bombing attacks on Iran, including its nuclear fuel enrichment site, he has been bewildered by Iranian resistance and resilience in withstanding the aerial onslaught and precipitating a global oil crisis by threatening the passage of ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
The inability to win was not only on the military front. The state of turmoil of the US economy as the bond market yields took off and the government intervened was highlighted in the fact that the gross national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time. Coming on top of Iran war expenses and the generous tax cuts that the Republicans effected last year, the United States has been pushed into crossing a portentous milestone with interest payments alone to touch $2 tn a year.
To conclude that it is all America’s problem might be understating the issues as any trouble that the world’s largest economy faces will have serious repercussions down the line in an interconnected world. The recklessness of Mr Trump’s economic and military moves is what is most worrisome. It is quite another matter that his family has gained enormously from his time in the White House, gathering a cool $2 billion and more in cryptocurrency profits even as most other investors lost.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump continues to joust with friends and allies more as in the case of the Canadians on whom he is imposing 50 per cent tariffs and Mr Mike Carney is threatening to retaliate dollar for dollar. Where Mr Trump is leading America, with its rising gas and supermarket prices, makes for a bundle of worries that may go way beyond the prospect of his experiencing his Vietnam moment in the needless Iran war he started and because of which his country is fast running out of missile shields and missiles.
