U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel, and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 25, 2026 REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump's debacles are stacking up and his only real option is to find someone else to blame for his failures.
In a discussion with The New Republic's Greg Sargent, staff writer Tim Noah, the two reporters discussed the recent report from a CIA analyst who revealed that Iran has far more weapons capabilities than initially thought. The country hasn't been obliterated quite as much as Trump's administration appeared to think. The warning is that Iran has close to 75 percent of its missile launchers left. It is enough to continue the fight for at least three to four months.
It means the political fallout of the Iran war "could last much longer than people expect," wrote Sargent.
"The stock market seems to be the last entity in the United States to actually believe what Donald Trump says about the war being on the verge of being over. I don’t think anybody else believes him, but the stock market does," mocked Noah. "And it keeps surging every time there’s the vaguest hint that this war may end soon. Now, if it finally penetrates the stock market’s thick skull that this war isn’t going to end soon, we’re going to see the opposite reaction. We’re going to see stocks go down, and that always sends Trump into a panic—and the Iranians know that."
As the election nears, Trump's coattails are proving to be more of an albatross around the necks of the GOP. It prompted Sargent to wonder if Trump would still be able to get a bump if the war were to end within the next few weeks.
"I think it’s bad. I think his approval rating goes down no matter what," said Noah. "First of all, the war isn’t his only problem. I mean, he’s got 12 problems as bad as the war. There’s the rule of law problem. There’s the Fed problem. There’s a number of problems."
Noah said that at first, in the Trump administration, his approval was going down slowly. Now it's moving faster.
"And I just don’t see how that doesn’t make trouble for the Republicans if they have Trump with a considerably lower approval rating than he has now," said Noah.
He then named Trump's personnel problem.
"At the moment, he’s got an FBI director who hands out bottles of bourbon as souvenirs," Noah said, laughing. "He’s going to have to get rid of a lot of his appointees, and that’s going to be embarrassing for him."
Sargent agreed, saying that he doesn't think that Trump will be able to get out from under the "pileup of problems."