Trump’s midterm malaise: endless war and high prices could spell doom for Republicans in November

‘Complete unraveling’ of Trump and Republican project reflects attitude of not caring at all about governance

H e was always one step ahead. Donald Trump won the US presidency as a wildly unlikely outsider in 2016 and staged an astonishing comeback to win it again in 2024. Even his foes grudgingly called him a political savant with an intuition for exploiting grievances that left so-called experts floundering.

But now they are asking if the dark genius has lost his touch. Trump is trapped in the quagmire of an unpopular war, obsessing over monuments in Washington and looking for a new spokesperson after his White House press secretary quit . If the 80-year-old was deliberately trying to sabotage his Republican party in November’s midterm elections, it is not clear what he would do differently.

“He’s always had a reptilian political instinct for public opinion that has served him well,” said Charlie Sykes , a conservative author and broadcaster. “You’re not seeing that much any more. You’re not seeing his ability to read the room. He seems tone-deaf on issues like the cost of living, the war, and the optics of gilding everything in sight and enshittifying Washington and he doesn’t care.”

Trump campaigned on promises to lower prices and keep the US out of foreign entanglements and forever wars. The opposite has happened. Voters say they are suffering a cost of living crisis, exacerbated by Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Buying food to eat at home has become 33% more expensive in US cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures .

Gas prices are at a record high for this time of year, in part thanks to the US war in Iran, which drags on with no end in sight. While Trump claims to have destroyed Iran’s military capabilities, it emerged this week that he was forced to hide in a catering truck and secretly swap planes after a Nato summit in Turkey because of a possible Iranian assassination plot.

The administration’s entanglement has metastasised into a gruelling, daily haemorrhage of resources, currently costing the taxpayer an estimated $1bn a day. Critics argue the administration has strengthened Iran’s resolve and provided it with global leverage, specifically over the strait of Hormuz. They see it as betrayal of the noninterventionist posture that fuelled Trump’s rise to power and attracted a generation of disaffected voters.

Kurt Bardella , a political commentator and former congressional aide, said: “ What we’re watching right now is the complete unraveling of everything that Donald Trump, Maga and Republicans said they were about. They were against endless conflicts in the Middle East and they started a conflict in the Middle East without an exit strategy. They were supposed to be about no more spending American dollars abroad ; we’re spending a billion dollars a day on this war without an end .”

Yet the president appears to have other, more aesthetic concerns.