Watching the strange spectacle of Trump committing political suicide

A woman sits in the ruins of her home in Tehran. Photograph by Maryam Saeedpoor. Posted to Twitter by Kev Joon.

Five weeks in, the Iran war is not going well. It is particularly not going well for President Trump.

A United States Air Force F-15E fighter jet went down in southwestern Iran on Friday; one of its crew was rescued, while a second crew member remained missing as of Friday at 5pm. A second US combat plane, an A-10 10C Warthog also was downed by Iranian fire, but reportedly went down in Kuwait. Two HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopters involved in rescue efforts “were damaged after taking fire from Iranian forces, with personnel wounded on one helicopter,” the Washington Examiner reported.

As of April 1^st, the U.S. military had hit over 12,000 targets in 13,000 combat flights in Iran, according to US Central Command.

But the Iranian regime seemed, if anything, emboldened, increasingly confident that it will survive the US and Israeli war, and currently recouping greater revenue from oil sales and its de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz than before the US/Israeli war began on Feb. 28.

Iran reportedly rejected a U.S. 48-hour ceasefire offer, according to Iranian state media. The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran has told a group of countries trying to mediate that it is not willing to meet US officials in Pakistan in the coming days, the paper reported. An Iranian official did not immediately respond to a query if that was the case.

“Iranian decision-makers are likely to prefer continued fighting over a ceasefire that would only serve as a prelude to a future round of hostilities,” former Israeli intelligence Iran analyst Danny Citrinowicz wrote on Twitter. “Absent guarantees that address their core strategic conditions, Iran has little incentive to bring the current campaign to an end.”

“While Iran may not have determined the timing of the conflict’s onset, it is intent on shaping the conditions under which it ends,” he said.

Trump hunkered down with aides at the White House Friday and made no public appearances.

On Thursday, he insisted that Iran was eager to make a deal.

“Why wouldn’t they call? We just blew up their three bridges last night,” he told Time Thursday, referring to Iran.

But it is Iran that increasingly thinks it has the upper hand, says Iran analyst Hamidreza Azizi.

“Trump’s recent speech was intended to project control over escalation and an endgame trajectory, but Iran has interpreted it in the opposite way,” Azizi wrote. “The combination of maximalist threats, the absence of a clear political endpoint, and the lack of a practical plan for reopening Hormuz allows Tehran to portray Washington not as dominant, but as strategically incoherent.”

Trump’s threats, in a belated address to the nation on Wednesday, to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age has worked to the Iranian regime’s advantage, said Alex Vatanka, an Iran expert at the Middle East Institute.

“If the United States starts blowing things up just for the sake of it, I think what happens is the regime benefits,” Vatanka said on a virtual Iran panel hosted by the Middle East Institute on Thursday. “The reaction to Pres. Trump’s comment about putting Iran back in the Stone Age really has not gone down well at all…and I am being generous in how I describe it.”

“In terms of what the US has in the toolbox, the idea of just sort of relying on more posturing, more escalation, that’s exactly what the regime on the other side seems to want,” he said.

Public opinion polling, meantime, continues to show Trump dropping to all-time low approval ratings, with roughly two thirds of the American public disapproving of his handling of the US economy and the cost of living issues, and widespread opposition to the war in Iran.

See G. Elliott Morris’s Strength in Numbers post today on Trump’s approval ratings sinking to the level of George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina and of Nixon after Watergate:

Donald Trump’s approval rating hit a new low this week. As of April 2, the FiftyPlusOne average puts his net approval at -21.4 — 37.2% approve, 58.6% disapprove. That’s the lowest mark of his second term.

How bad is -21.4? When compared to past presidents, Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their term, going back to FDR. …

If you treat Trump as a second-term president, his rating today is higher only than Richard Nixon’s after Watergate and tied with confidence in George W Bush after Katrina and the worsening war in Iraq:

Morris concludes:

“To sum up: Trump’s approval ratings slide doesn’t look like the result of one isolated crisis so much as the cumulative effect of a presidency that keeps making voters feel not listened to and less economically secure. Again and again, the biggest drops in his standing follow events that raised costs, heightened uncertainty, or reinforced a sense that the country is off track. And because the president has shown almost no ability — or interest — in winning back support, his unpopularity looks less like a purely political or economic liability and more like a defining feature of his second term.”

See also:

Pew: Americans Broadly Disapprove of U.S. Military Action in Iran.

Reuters/Ipsos: Trump’s approval hits new 36% low as fuel prices surge amid Iran war, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.

AP: Most Americans say US military action against Iran has gone too far, a new AP-NORC poll finds.

RCP:

**