He Didn’t Ask

P eople will make sacrifices in wartime when necessary.

It’s much harder to expect them to willingly endure any kind of hardship, though, when it’s a war they don’t support, didn’t want, and were never consulted about.

If Republicans get thumped in the midterms, all the polling suggests that prices will be one of the main reasons, with the Iran war’s contribution to higher costs looming large.

According to the latest New York Times/Siena poll, which is consistent with other surveys, 65 percent disapprove of President Trump’s handling of the war in Iran, and almost 75 percent disapprove of his handling of gas prices, two issues that are obviously closely intertwined.

Most of the public doesn’t spend time thinking about the balance between the executive and legislative branches, or worrying too much about the niceties of when a military intervention should be authorized by Congress. If the Iran war had been as short as advertised, or if it had dragged on with no appreciable cost back home, most people presumably wouldn’t have cared very much, even if they weren’t on board. It’s the combination of a relatively drawn-out war causing elevated prices that’s a killer, and I’m guessing that it’s insult to injury for many people that Trump has handled the matter with such high-handedness.

It’s often remarked that Trump’s obsession with naming things after himself, or building things in Washington, is hurting him because it makes him seem out of touch and interested only in his own priorities. But none of this directly harms anyone — unless they, say, hold a season pass to the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.

The Iran war, in contrast, has imposed an economic cost on nearly everyone in the country, one that is particularly marked for the people least able to afford it.

President Trump has an idiosyncratic view of representative government. The common understanding of our system is that we elect representatives who debate and vote on legislation, before standing for election again and finding out if their constituents still want them as their representatives.

Trump’s populist understanding is different — he’s the people’s representative. It makes sense that Trump, who has a highly personalized view of government and of his movement, has a highly personal view of himself as the tribune of the people.

This tends to render the other representatives an annoyance and unnecessary encumbrance, and indeed this is how Trump has largely treated Congress in his second term.

So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it evidently didn’t occur to him to ask Congress to authorize the Iran war. There have been comparisons made between Trump’s war and George W. Bush’s in Iraq, but this is a stark difference. Bush went to Congress, and by the time lawmakers authorized the war, it was a matter of national consensus (although one that quickly fell apart).

Trump hasn’t gone to Congress on his tariffs, either, but he made it abundantly clear in the 2024 campaign that he intended to drastically increase foreign duties. Compared with that, the Iran war was a bolt from the blue.

There have been ongoing efforts to cushion the conflict from public accountability. Trump officials and Republican officeholders have tried to argue that it isn’t really “a war,” and Trump has made it clear that a renewal of a major bombing campaign will only occur after the election, an effort to try to keep the war from being front and center when people vote.

Now, although the war hasn’t gone as planned, we need to wait to see how it turns out to make an ultimate verdict on its wisdom and how it’s been conducted.

Yet, we can’t expect great patience from the public when it wasn’t asked or even informed beforehand.