It’s no great insight to say Trump’s impulsive Iran War has been a big political loser for him. Even some of his and the war’s supporters would concede that point. “Katrinas” are also wildly overdetermined and over-diagnosed in political talk. How many “Obama’s Katrinas” were there? How many did Joe Biden allegedly have? But it did occur to me this morning that it is something like that for Trump but for a specifically Trumpian reason. Donald Trump’s great super power is changing the subject. He never sticks to one racket or con until its rung out of all its juice. He’s always on to some new thing because — long before we lived in the broken world of social media — Trump has always lived in the attention economy. Attention is the great commodity. It’s even more powerful for Trump as a defensive weapon. When something isn’t going great he’s always creating some new drama, some new thing to change the subject to. But what we’re seeing now is that Trump simply cannot change the subject. The whole Iran War story is devastatingly bad for him. And he simply has no way to stop it from being the big, dominating story. He can’t make any shiny object take its place. He’s stuck, not just militarily but politically as well.
Things a president does at home he can generally undo or just stop doing. Not always but usually, at least to a degree. Not long after the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, the White House began moonwalking away from its intentionally high-profile and confrontational occupations of Midwestern Blue state cities. Mass deportations didn’t stop. A lot of the same ICE predations continued. But the temperature was reduced significantly and the high-profile, news-generating confrontations slowed. It was hurting Trump politically so he pulled back, at least from the actions generating news.
Abroad, things work differently. Even for a U.S. president, there are others parties involved. They can act unpredictably or beyond a president’s control. Tariffs were in a sense an example of this. Longterm, Trump has unleashed trade and economic forces the U.S. cannot easily control or recover from. But in the near term Trump could and in many case did simply pull the tariffs, often through carve-outs or other means that didn’t drive a lot of attention. Critically, every country targeted by tariffs was happy to give him an out. They weren’t going to make it hard. They just wanted the tariffs rescinded or reduced. Often they were willing to toast Trump’s capitulation as some kind of signal Trump victory.
Iran is a very different matter. The war is extremely high profile. It is unambiguously his war. It has affected everyone in the country through dramatically higher gas prices. It is also a catch-all explanation and point of blame for inflation and high prices generally even though the inflationary effects of the war are probably still mostly in the future. Iran meanwhile is in no mood to give him an out. Obviously the Iranian government wants to hurt the U.S. and Trump specifically as much as possible. They also realize that even if their situation is desperate, Trump’s is more so.
They say a shark has to keep moving forward or it will die (turns out this is only true for some sharks). For Donald Trump it’s changing the subject. I’m not saying he’s approaching political death. But he is stuck and unable to change the subject in what I think is a genuinely new way for him. And for his political prospects, it’s a very big deal.