“I don’t care about the midterms!” US President Donald Trump thundered late last month. Yet he must start repairing the enormous damage he is doing to his administration and the Republican Party. Otherwise, the usual midterm setback in the US Congress may become a historic wipeout.
From his solipsistic perspective, the outcome in November won’t have any personal impact. He won’t be on any ballot, has just turned 80 and is ineligible for a third presidential term.
He can insist that if he’d been on the ballot, the results would have been very different. But if the Democratic Party takes back just the House of Representatives, his presidency will be restricted to foreign policy. They likely won’t pass any more legislation.
Many hawkish Senate Republicans sound disturbed by the US-Iran framework agreement and an apparently advantageous outcome for Tehran. The whole party is concerned that the President seems more interested in vanity projects and stamping his name all over Washington than addressing the crisis of affordability for ordinary people.
Democrats will run hard on that potent issue, while mocking absurdities such as the recent cage-fighting spectacle outside the White House and many other hints of the 2006 dark comedy film Idiocracy coming to life.
If Democrats also take back the Senate, Mr Trump won’t even be able to appoint officials, including to the Supreme Court. This is especially assured given the Republican-majority Senate’s scandalous refusal in 2016 to give then-president Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, consideration for 293 days. Payback time beckons.
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Trump: I never cared about regime change in Iran
As the war with Iran demonstrates, foreign policy is not Mr Trump’s strong suit. Yet there’s little the President can do domestically without Congress.
Even if Democrats merely win the House, he will face investigations into, for example, allegations of corruption involving his family since his return to power. Democrats will also note the cavernous gap between Mr Trump’s proclamations during the Iran war and what he has apparently just agreed.
My Arabian Gulf States Institute colleague, the Iran expert Ali Alfoneh, long speculated that the regime in Tehran was calculating that Mr Trump was keeping an eye on the midterms all along. If so, it paid off.
Mr Trump was convinced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if Iran were heavily bombarded, the public would quickly overthrow their government. Once that failed, Mr Trump had a Fantasy B: that some within the regime would offer to co-operate with Washington to stay in power, a repetition of the “Venezuela scenario” .
That idea also quickly collapsed as the highly institutionalised and well-prepared regime simply replaced slain leaders and carried on. Mr Trump found himself running a highly unpopular war without an achievable goal or intelligible purpose .
He could continue to pound Iran, kill more people, damage its security infrastructure and so on. But he found himself in a classic bind in which a stronger power, without clear and achievable goals or a sufficient stake in the outcome, confronts a weaker power willing to endure any sacrifice in an existential struggle for survival, and at least prevail by not losing.
We’ve seen this movie countless times. This version either has the dark inevitability of Greek tragedy or the slapstick absurdity of Roman farce, depending on one’s perspective.
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Worse for Republicans, pain at the petrol pump will probably last well past when voting begins. Early indications are grim
Mr Trump apparently does indeed care about the midterms since he has agreed to lift the blockade of Iran’s ports and, reportedly, provide Iran with billions in frozen assets and possibly other “reconstruction funds”, in exchange for Tehran ending its extortion racket in the Strait of Hormuz. Unless the secret framework agreement text differs radically from most descriptions , this agreement could go down as one of the most wretched and humiliating in US diplomatic history. Expect “constructive ambiguity” throughout the text, which is likely to be vague enough to allow for many interpretations.
Most American voters will probably just be relieved that the war is over. They won’t care much about the details, especially since they won’t learn about them. Whatever they do hear, they largely may not understand.
They will be told, and many might believe, that at long last Iran has promised not to build a nuclear bomb (though it’s what Iran has always unconvincingly maintained). They will be assured that the reopening of shipping is a great victory, even though Iran can always close down the Strait again whenever it wants.
Worse for Republicans, pain at the petrol pump will probably last well past when voting begins. Early indications are grim. Mr Trump’s approval ratings are among the worst ever registered for any US President, which usually indicates severe trouble in the midterms.
And even if Republic…
Read the full article at The National →
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