Failure is cumulative.
In his defense of the argument that Republican travails are entirely about the war in Iran (and, for that matter, only about the war and not about its execution or the botched cease-fire) — and that anyone pointing to the damage done by the Trump tariff policy for nearly a year before the war is “gaslighting” — Michael Brendan Dougherty points to Donald Trump’s approval ratings: “Going from 47 approval on Inauguration Day to stabilizing at 40 isn’t optimal. But dropping to 33 by August of 2026 is catastrophic.”
I don’t know what polls he is looking at. If you browse the RealClearPolitics average, Trump started his honeymoon at 50.4 percent on January 28, 2025, was at 49.4 percent a month later, but ended at 39.1 percent approval on Election Day, after having bottomed out at 37.8 percent on October 10. In the month before the war’s initiation on February 28, he was consistently between 42 percent and 44 percent, where he’d mostly been since November 2025. He was at 43.5 percent the day the war was launched. True, that understates the problem a bit, because his disapproval numbers rose as 2026 wore on, but the bulk of the damage was already done in 2025. As I tracked the chronology back in May:
Trump’s approval rating fell below his disapproval rating on March 13, 2025, and has never recovered. By the end of April 2025, he was seven points underwater. That deficit hit double digits in November 2025 and was last below double digits on January 12, 2026. . . . The timeline of when the wheels started to come off is consistent with the early and repeated emphasis by Trump and his administration on a major tariff push. Major tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China were announced at the start of February 2025. These were the subject of executive orders implemented by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on March 4 and 7. Global 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum, announced in February, were imposed on March 12. By early March, the administration was openly headed for the global tariffs announced on “liberation day,” April 2. By March 13, 2025, Trump was polling worse on the economy than at any point in his first term. The stock markets took a big tumble on tariff fears around March 10 and again on the eve of “liberation day.” They began to recover when Trump signaled a climbdown on the most sweeping tariffs around April 23, which also coincided with a partial rally in his approval ratings between April 27 (7.1 points underwater) and May 21 (1.9 points). Trump also enjoyed a modest rally between February 23, 2026 (13.4 points underwater) and March 8 (10.6 points), on the heels of Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump, the February 20 Supreme Court decision striking down the bulk of his tariffs.
If you look at the generic congressional ballot, you see a similar story: Faith in Republicans dropped off badly after the tariffs and never recovered, but things got better for the Democrats late in the game. Republicans were at 45.5 percent and tied or ahead until the beginning of March 2025 but fell down to 41.1 percent by September 9, 2025. They were back down to 41.1 percent a month before the war and at 42.9 when it started. They ended up at 43.9. Democrats had a 5-point lead in early February 2026 and a 5.7-point lead on Labor Day 2026, before pulling away in the fall as the campaign heated up. Again, this is not proof that the tariffs did all the damage, which is not my argument, but it shows that a very significant share of the damage was already done before the war.
Of course, the complicating factor is that, after the war started, Trump was still pushing tariffs, albeit through different and less sweeping legal mechanisms following the Learning Resources case. Moreover, the tariff policy, whose entire point was to promote domestic industry by making consumer prices of imported goods more expensive, destroyed public confidence in Trump’s management of the economy and inflation before the war ever started, as I’ve also repeatedly detailed. We’ve seen that kind of dynamic before, whether it be Joe Biden’s Afghanistan debacle — which destroyed his reputation as an elder statesman and raised questions about his fitness — or the monsoon of bad press for George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina, which accelerated doubts about his handling of Iraq (and vice versa). Once the voters lose trust in your supposed core competency, they’re much quicker to mistrust the next thing you do. The fact that exit polls showed that almost nobody believed the tariffs were working should surely trigger a reconsideration of the centerpiece of the first year of Trump’s term and the decision to have that centerpiece be an economic policy diametrically opposed to the one thing voters wanted most.
There’s also the matter of where Republicans were especially hard-hit: in big farming and export states and across the regions bordering Canada, all of which took a very direct hit from the trade war. Democrats loudly exploited that in those states, and it tracks as well with the falloff of rural turnout.
Failure is cumulative. You can’t wash away the first 13 months of a 21-month slide.