What links all these things? In addition to the massive human toll they’re inflicting, they suggest that Trump is about to pull off a unique trifecta. He is frittering away the strength he and Republicans have enjoyed in recent years on three major GOP-friendly issues: The economy, immigration, and national security.
None of that is happening. And that’s significant in not-so-obvious ways.
What’s more, Reuters reports that military investigators now believe U.S. forces likely bombed the school. We should suspend final judgement, of course. But it’s looking very much like this atrocity—one of the worst massacres of civilians in memory—is the result of Trump’s war. Whatever we learn about it, there will inevitably be more such horrors.
But we’re now learning why we have the sort of constraints on military conduct these men ridicule. “Trump, Miller and Hegseth’s FAFO approach to the use of official government force and violence comes with considerable risk,” Democratic Congressman Adam Smith told me, employing the acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out.” Atrocities like the school bombing, he added, show the perils that come when we “brazenly dismiss any sort of rules of engagement designed to protect the lives and rights of civilians.”
But it does matter. Data analyst G. Elliott Morris averaged high quality polling on Trump’s Iran invasion, and found that only 38 percent of respondents approve—the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever. Trump’s overall approval has also dropped a hair since the bombing began—it’s hovering at around 39-58—leading Morris to conclude that no rally-around-the-flag effect is materializing.
I’ve already tried to demonstrate at length that Trump is throwing away the GOP’s recent edge on the economy and immigration, too. The latest news reinforces this: The abysmal jobs report adds to a bigger picture in which job growth has been significantly lower under Trump than under his predecessor. His numbers on the economy are awful.
None of this guarantees a Democratic win this fall, and a rebound remains possible. Trump might end the war on a claim of victory, dial back paramilitary violence against Americans, and enjoy some kind of economic resurgence. Yet right now, George W. Bush’s fate is beckoning. While immigration was less relevant back then, the financial crisis and Iraq debacle wrecked Bush’s standing on the economy and foreign affairs alike. Iraq—and Hurricane Katrina—irreparably broke public impressions of Bush’s executive competence. From 2016 onward, Republicans largely recaptured these issues. But now Trump is drifting close to the Bush danger zone.
This calculus assumes most voters will unthinkingly glimpse “strength” in nationalist belligerence, in unshackled state violence at home and abroad, in nakedly authoritarian abuses of power. The Miller-Hegseth calculation resembles the old Bill Clinton adage—that being “strong and wrong” is always politically better than “weak and right.” Trump can’t lose as long as he’s cracking the heads of the right “enemies,” whether they’re Euroweenie elites, “criminal illegal aliens,” or what Miller calls the “savages” in the Mideast.
That supreme hubris is now breaking up on the shoals of Trump’s malevolence and incompetence on tariffs, his undisguised white nationalist brutality on immigration, and his sociopathic warmongering amid an obvious lack of any real war rationale. In 2024, Trump coasted on (undeserved) GOP strength on the economy, immigration, and national security, but those pillars are now crumbling. Americans are seeing the real “America First” agenda up close—militarism, imperialism, malign nationalism, unabashed authoritarianism—and they’re recoiling. Though this is small consolation amid all the darkness enveloping us, it’s nonetheless a heartening development indeed.
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