“I don’t care about the midterms!” US President Donald Trump thundered late last month. Yet he must start repairing the enormous damage he is doing to his administration and the Republican Party. Otherwise, the usual midterm setback in the US Congress may become a historic wipeout.
From his solipsistic perspective, the outcome in November won’t have any personal impact. He won’t be on any ballot, has just turned 80 and is ineligible for a third presidential term.
He can insist that if he’d been on the ballot, the results would have been very different. But if the Democratic Party takes back just the House of Representatives, his presidency will be restricted to foreign policy. They likely won’t pass any more legislation.
Many hawkish Senate Republicans sound disturbed by the US-Iran framework agreement and an apparently advantageous outcome for Tehran. The whole party is concerned that the President seems more interested in vanity projects and stamping his name all over Washington than addressing the crisis of affordability for ordinary people.
Democrats will run hard on that potent issue, while mocking absurdities such as the recent cage-fighting spectacle outside the White House and many other hints of the 2006 dark comedy film Idiocracy coming to life.
If Democrats also take back the Senate, Mr Trump won’t even be able to appoint officials, including to the Supreme Court. This is especially assured given the Republican-majority Senate’s scandalous refusal in 2016 to give then-president Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, consideration for 293 days. Payback time beckons.
As the war with Iran demonstrates, foreign policy is not Mr Trump’s strong suit. Yet there’s little the President can do domestically without Congress.
Even if Democrats merely win the House, he will face investigations into, for example, allegations of corruption involving his family since his return to power. Democrats will also note the cavernous gap between Mr Trump’s proclamations during the Iran war and what he has apparently just agreed.
My Arabian Gulf States Institute colleague, the Iran expert Ali Alfoneh, long speculated that the regime in Tehran was calculating that Mr Trump was keeping an eye on the midterms all along. If so, it paid off.
Mr Trump was convinced by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that if Iran were heavily bombarded, the public would quickly overthrow their government. Once that failed, Mr Trump had a Fantasy B: that some within the regime would offer to co-operate with Washington to stay in power, a repetition of the “Venezuela scenario”.
That idea also quickly collapsed as the highly institutionalised and well-prepared regime simply replaced slain leaders and carried on. Mr Trump found himself running a highly unpopular war without an achievable goal or intelligible purpose.
He could continue to pound Iran, kill more people, damage its security infrastructure and so on. But he found himself in a classic bind in which a stronger power, without clear and achievable goals or a sufficient stake in the outcome, confronts a weaker power willing to endure any sacrifice in an existential struggle for survival, and at least prevail by not losing.
We’ve seen this movie countless times. This version either has the dark inevitability of Greek tragedy or the slapstick absurdity of Roman farce, depending on one’s perspective.
Mr Trump apparently does indeed care about the midterms since he has agreed to lift the blockade of Iran’s ports and, reportedly, provide Iran with billions in frozen assets and possibly other “reconstruction funds”, in exchange for Tehran ending its extortion racket in the Strait of Hormuz. Unless the secret framework agreement text differs radically from most descriptions, this agreement could go down as one of the most wretched and humiliating in US diplomatic history. Expect “constructive ambiguity” throughout the text, which is likely to be vague enough to allow for many interpretations.
Most American voters will probably just be relieved that the war is over. They won’t care much about the details, especially since they won’t learn about them. Whatever they do hear, they largely may not understand.
They will be told, and many might believe, that at long last Iran has promised not to build a nuclear bomb (though it’s what Iran has always unconvincingly maintained). They will be assured that the reopening of shipping is a great victory, even though Iran can always close down the Strait again whenever it wants.
Worse for Republicans, pain at the petrol pump will probably last well past when voting begins. Early indications are grim. Mr Trump’s approval ratings are among the worst ever registered for any US President, which usually indicates severe trouble in the midterms.
And even if Republicans manage to hold the Senate, which remains possible especially with rampant gerrymandering around the country with the help of the Supreme Court and other myriad other anti-democratic efforts afoot, Mr Trump will still emerge as a lame-duck. He will no longer wield much authority because his time in the White House is limited to a certain date.
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Smoke billows from the tanker Skylight, minutes after it was hit by an Iranian drone early on March 1. Photo: Singh family -
Two sailors were killed and four injured in the drone attack. Photo: Sunil Pooniya -
The engine room was hit. Photo: Sunil Pooniya -
A gaping hole is visible in the engine room of the tanker. Photo: Sunil Pooniya -
Sunil Pooniya takes a selfie with his shipmates that survived the attack. Photo: Sunil Pooniya -
The crew of the tanker Skylight with Indian embassy officials in Muscat, after they were evacuated from the burning tanker. Photo: Sunil Pooniya -
Dalip Singh keeps watch on the tanker Skylight off the coast of Oman before a drone attack that killed him and the captain of the ship. Photo: Singh family -
Fire ripped through the engine room and living area. Photo: Sunil Pooniya -
A cargo boat navigates the sea behind a mural depicting fishes at the shoreline on Qeshm Island, Iran. Getty Images -
Fishing boats sit idle along the Strait of Hormuz near Qeshm Island, Iran, as negotiations continue between the US and Iran over opening the critical waterway. Getty Images -
Boats await the opening of the Strait of Hormuz after safe passage was disrupted following the Iranian war. Getty Images -
The International Maritime Organisation has urged safe passage for seafarers. Getty Images -
At least 11 sailors have been killed in 38 attacks on vessels in the Arabian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran war began on February 28. Getty Images
The battle for succession, already tentatively beginning, will swing into heavy intensity immediately after the midterms. Mr Trump may have a magic touch with many Americans. But he has not developed a coherent ideology, or a campaigning or governing message, that can be successfully transferred to anybody else – especially anyone not named Trump.
By sentencing Vice President JD Vance to lead the signing delegation with Iranian officials this Friday, Mr Trump is saddling him with arguably the worst assignment any American official has received in living memory. Perhaps Mr Trump views it as fitting payback for Mr Vance’s clear opposition to the war. He cannot be dismissed, like everybody else, but he can be made to take on the difficult task of bringing the agreement to a close.
Will any of this make a difference in November? Probably. Joe Biden never really recovered from his clumsily implementing Washington’s agreement with the Taliban, made during Mr Trump’s first term, to withdraw from Afghanistan. Even for many who care little about international relations, it’s obvious that this war and possibly the framework agreement are a far deeper blunder.
Mr Trump apparently expected to overthrow the Iranian regime. When that didn’t happen, he wanted to take control of it, as in Venezuela. And then when he lost interest, on June 1, he called the negotiations “very boring”.
Whatever happens in November, starting tomorrow, the biggest winners might not be Democrats or even Republicans, but the radicalised, emboldened and despotic rulers of Iran.
