Some presidents win a war and ride it. Donald Trump ended the Iran war at Versailles last week, held a dinner of American farmers in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday, and told them, according to Fox News: “We knocked the hell out of them, and now we’re negotiating from a position of pure strength.” The farmers eating that dinner are purchasing groceries at 4.2 percent inflation. They applauded anyway, which is the kind of loyalty that explains a lot about the next two minutes of this piece.
The Washington Examiner published its midterm damage assessment this morning and the numbers are the kind that get printed in small type so they feel less large. Trump’s approval sits 17 points underwater in the RealClearPolitics aggregate, a gap that is not a polling blip so much as a structural condition. On the economy, voters disapprove by 26.3 points. On inflation specifically, which the Examiner calls “the issue that matters most” and which is also the issue that ended Joe Biden’s presidency, nearly 69 percent of voters disapprove of the president’s handling of it. His approval in Pennsylvania has cratered to 29 percent. Pennsylvania is not an optional state. It is the state.
Inflation hit a three-year high of 4.2 percent in May. The Trump-appointed Federal Reserve chairman Kevin Warsh declined to cut interest rates at the June meeting. The vote to hold was unanimous, which is what unanimous means when your own pick chairs the meeting. Prediction markets now expect a rate increase by year’s end. The average 30-year fixed mortgage sits at 6.5 percent. According to Yale’s Budget Lab, the tariff regime cost American households between $939 and $1,478 in purchasing power, which is a consumption tax on people who were told they were getting manufacturing jobs. The manufacturing has not visibly arrived. The tax has been collected.
The Iran MOU, which Trump signed to universal acclaim at Versailles and which Iran’s negotiator simultaneously described as achieving more than military action could have produced, has cracked what the Examiner calls “foreign policy fractures” in the 2024 coalition. Hawks call it appeasement. Loyalists call it genius. Both groups are currently arguing in the same publications, which is the condition that produces the kind of incoherence that polls measure as disapproval.
On Thursday night Trump told the farmers it was “pure strength.” The strength is 29 percent in Pennsylvania.
When 69 percent of voters disapprove of the president’s inflation handling and inflation is at a three-year high, what is the remaining 31 percent approving of?
Sources
Washington Examiner: Trump’s bigger problems than Iran could determine the midterm elections
Fox News live: US-Iran deal, Iran drone strike
Raw Story: Trump is ‘sleepwalking into a bruising wakeup call’: columnist
