When Donald Trump ordered strikes on Iran alongside Israel, he framed the operation as swift and decisive – a war measured in weeks, not months. Eight months later, that promise has become the single clearest liability of his second term. A Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed Monday put Trump’s approval rating at 33%, the lowest of his entire presidency, with 64% of respondents disapproving. The number ties the worst mark of his first term, reached back in December 2017, and it comes wrapped in a broader finding that should worry Republican strategists heading into November: an overwhelming 80% of Americans now believe US involvement in Iran will drag on indefinitely.
A Promise That Didn’t Survive Contact With Reality
The gap between what Trump promised and what actually happened is doing most of the political damage. He entered the conflict pledging to keep it short and to keep inflation under control – two commitments that were central to his return to office in 2025, when just under half the country approved of his presidency. Instead, Iran has proven far more resilient than the administration anticipated, keeping the Strait of Hormuz largely bottled up even as the fighting itself has cooled. That persistence has turned what was sold as a quick, contained operation into an open-ended commitment, and voters have noticed: only 16% think the conflict will wrap up in a matter of weeks, while the 80% who expect a prolonged entanglement span the political spectrum – 87% of Democrats, but also 71% of Republicans.
That cross-partisan convergence is the more striking data point. Wars that drag on longer than promised tend to erode a president’s base support gradually, but when even seven in ten members of the president’s own party expect the conflict to persist, it signals that the administration’s messaging has essentially lost the argument even among sympathetic audiences. Consistent with that, just one in five Americans overall – and only half of Republicans – say the war has actually been worth it.
Gas Prices as the Transmission Mechanism
If the war itself is the political wound, gasoline prices are the mechanism spreading the damage into household budgets. The conflict paralyzed a fifth of global oil trade, and the resulting price surge is landing directly on American consumers at the pump – exactly the kind of kitchen-table economic pain that tends to translate into ballot-box consequences. Trump has tried to get ahead of the narrative rather than dodge it, telling a rally in Garden City, New York, that a modest increase in gas prices is a reasonable cost to prevent what he’s called a dangerous adversary from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But framing higher prices as a worthwhile sacrifice is a harder sell when a majority of the public no longer buys the underlying premise that the war is worth its costs at all.
The Economic Trust Gap Reopens
Perhaps the most consequential shift buried in the poll isn’t about the war directly but about who voters trust to manage its economic fallout. For roughly the past decade, Republicans have generally held an edge – or at least parity – with Democrats on questions of economic stewardship. That has now flipped: 38% of voters say Democrats would handle the economy better, against 35% for Republicans, continuing a trend this month’s Reuters/Ipsos polling has shown for the first time in about ten years. Democrats are also now seen as better positioned to manage the cost of living, a category that includes exactly the kind of gas-price pressure the Iran conflict has generated.
Immigration remains the one policy area where Republicans still hold ground, a legacy of Trump’s aggressive crackdown and the resulting sharp decline in border crossings. But even that advantage is thinning: Republicans now lead Democrats on immigration by just 2 percentage points, down from a 26-point lead in January 2025, as deadly enforcement confrontations and a surge in detained individuals – including children – chip away at what had been the administration’s most durable strength.
What This Means for November
Taken together, the numbers describe a president whose signature foreign policy gamble has become a drag on the very issues – the economy and, increasingly, immigration – that had underpinned his political coalition. With Republicans defending a slim House majority and Democrats now eyeing the Senate as plausibly within reach, the erosion isn’t abstract; it’s arriving in a midterm election year, at the moment party strategists least want it. Trump has spent the conflict oscillating between threats of further escalation and claims that peace is close at hand. The poll suggests voters have stopped waiting to see which version turns out to be true, and are instead judging the war – and the president – by results already on the table: higher prices, an uncertain endpoint, and a shrinking share of the country still willing to call it worth it.
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