Donald Trump and the War in Iran: A Political Poison for Republicans

Context: Donald Trump’s approach to the war in Iran is causing concern among Republicans.

President Donald Trump’s war in Iran is increasingly becoming a political poison for Republicans, providing Democrats with more ammunition to show voters that the president’s party does not care about the cost of life despite helping him get elected.

While the White House hoped that Trump’s speech on Wednesday could stop the continuous decline in his popularity ratings, the president’s most politically significant statements were actually made earlier in the day during an Easter lunch.

“We are at war,” Trump declared at the private event, during which he criticized Emmanuel Macron, whose video was subsequently removed from the White House website. “We cannot deal with childcare. We cannot take care of childcare, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. States can handle that. We need to focus on one thing: military protection.”

The Soaring Gas Prices in the United States

These statements, giving priority to a war that most Americans consider unnecessary while rejecting any responsibility to help families pay for childcare, seem tailor-made to fuel the Democrats’ arguments. “This is really, really bad for Republicans’ midterm elections,” said former Wisconsin representative Reid Ribble to HuffPost US.

Ribble, who served in the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 and was one of the few Republicans to oppose Trump, explained that Republicans with traditional foreign policy positions, like him, support military intervention against Iran (with approval from Congress). However, the public is more concerned about their own wallets, and the war will hurt them.

Trump’s war has pushed the average gallon of gas above $4 for the first time in four years. This is the fastest rise in gas prices in decades, and Democrats have already started running ads blaming Trump for it.

Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and former economic advisor to Joe Biden, indicated that the increase in fuel prices will lead to an even stronger rise in food prices. “Food inflation was already high. Now, we have higher diesel prices, while 80% of our food is transported by truck,” he stated.

The Democrats and the Memory of the War in Ukraine

Trump and his allies claim that fuel prices will drop as soon as the conflict with Iran calms down, as Trump suggested on Wednesday with a timeline of two to three weeks. However, experts and markets expect prices to remain high for at least several months.

For Democrats, this recalls 2024 when focus group discussions with voters revealed confusion as to why the US was sending money to Ukraine while they struggled to pay their rent. Trump and his allies had presented Biden’s support for Ukraine as a mistake that could lead to a world war.

“Republicans and Trump have succeeded not only in aligning themselves with two of the most unpopular positions possible – supporting a foreign war and doing nothing to help people at home – but these two dynamics completely reinforce each other,” a Democratic advisor in the House of Representatives believes. “Every day, Republicans make Democrats’ arguments more credible, concrete, and convincing.” They aim to capitalize on this during the upcoming midterms in November.

Fact Check: This article is a translation by the editorial team of HuffPost France of an article originally published in March 2026 by HuffPost US. The original article can be read here.