President Donald Trump says the Iran war will end “soon,” a promise he’s been making most of this year. Eventually, he will be right, but it hasn’t happened in time for the midterm elections, and his party is bearing the brunt.

If Republicans get thumped, polling suggests that prices will be one of the reasons, with the Iran war’s contribution looming large. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll, 65 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the
war in Iran, and almost
75 percent disapprove of his handling of gas prices, two closely intertwined issues.

If the Iran war had been as short as initially advertised, or if it had dragged on with no appreciable cost back home, most people presumably wouldn’t have cared very much, even if they were not on board. It’s the combination of a relatively drawn-out war causing elevated prices that’s a killer, and it adds insult to injury that Trump has handled the matter with such high-handedness. He did not ask Congress to authorize the war, and barely made a public case beforehand.

It’s often remarked that Trump’s obsession with naming things after himself is hurting him because it makes him seem out of touch and interested only in his own priorities. But none of this directly harms anyone — unless they, say, hold a season pass to the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center. The Iran war, in contrast, has imposed an economic cost on nearly everyone in the country.

Trump has an idiosyncratic view of representative government. The common understanding of our system is that we elect representatives who debate and vote on important public matters, before standing for election again and finding out if their constituents still want them. Trump’s populist understanding is different — he’s the people’s representative.

It makes sense that Trump, who has a highly personalized view of government and of his movement, has a highly personal view
of himself as the tribune of the people. This tends to render the other representatives an unnecessary encumbrance, and indeed this is how Trump has largely treated Congress in his second term. So it should not be a surprise that it evidently did not occur to him to ask Congress to authorize the Iran war.

There have been comparisons made between Trump’s war and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but this is a stark difference. Bush went to Congress, and by the time lawmakers authorized the war, it was a matter of national consensus (although one that fell apart). Trump has not gone to Congress on his tariffs, either, but he made it abundantly clear in the 2024 campaign that he intended to drastically increase duties. Compared with that, the Iran war was a bolt from the blue.

There have been ongoing efforts to cushion the conflict from public accountability. Republicans have tried to argue that it isn’t really “a war,” and Trump has said that a renewal of a major bombing campaign will occur only after the election, an effort to keep the war from being front and center during voting.

Now, although the war has not gone as planned, we need to wait to see how it turns out to make an ultimate judgment — if Trump manages to crack the regime, it will indeed be a legacy-defining achievement. The problem for now, though, is that you can’t expect great patience from the public when it wasn’t asked or even informed beforehand.

Rich Lowry is on X
@RichLowry.