The ghost of 1980 and the 'curse' that could crush Trump’s presidency

U.S. President Donald Trump looks up as he participates in a roundtable on antifa September 22, at the White House in Washington (REUTERS)

Trump is blustering hard at the economic damage he’s got in store for Iran. But Iran’s most devastating president-killer is locked and loaded on Trump. And it rarely misses its mark, according to the Guardian.

“Months before Jimmy Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan, eight US servicemen died in a botched high-risk rescue mission that failed to secure the freedom of dozens of US hostages seized in Tehran,” reports Guardian writer Robert Tait. “As he addressed students and academics, keen for reflections on his single-term presidency, one of the students asked Carter: what do you most regret?”

“Not sending more helicopters for the hostage rescue,” Carter immediately replied, according to Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, who hosted the event. “It was very much on his mind,” said Sabato.

If Trump is thinking anything at all as he dances and blusters his way through November midterm rallies and run-offs, he’s probably got Iran on his mind — and what it did to Carter.

Trump remains embroiled in his self-made Iranian quagmire as he flounders toward the midterms and the likely prospect of losing one or both chambers of Congress to Democrats. Polls suggest voters are looking to retaliate against Trump’s beholden Republican Party for letting Trump pull the nation into war and subsequent high inflation and gas prices.

The president’s efforts to finish the war he started along with Israel, have hit rocks after a ceasefire agreement signed in June collapsed – leaving Iran in control of the strategic strait of Hormuz, the conduit for one-fifth of the world’s oil supplies before Trump’s war closed it, reports Tait.

Now, said Tait, Trump is deep in Carter vibes as the midterms mangle him.

“With public support for the war running low, polls show a majority of American voters believe they are worse off since Trump returned to office in January 2025. That indicator alone has echoes of Reagan’s famous question to voters during his 1980 presidential debate with Carter: ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’”

But Trump’s troubles have a broader resemblance to Carter’s dilemma, Sabato told the Guardian. Like Carter, who failed to rescue hostages when revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in 1979 and held 52 diplomats and military personnel, Trump’s every option ultimately worsens his predicament.

“Carter couldn’t change course, and maybe that’s what’s most applicable, because Trump can’t change course either,” said Sabato. “Carter was stuck because, after the failed rescue, the hostages were dispersed throughout Iran and there was no way to recover them.”

Iran released the hostages after 444 days in captivity, minutes after Reagan was sworn into office on 20 January 1981, in what is alleged to be an inside deal with the incoming Reagan campaign working to prevent the U.S. hostages from being freed before Election Day. But for Trump there is no shadowy deal between Iranian officials and Republican apparatchiks to pull Americans out of the mess. Trump bungled into this one entirely of his own volition.

And now it’s time for “payback,” reports Tait—Iran style.

“They are determined to make him pay the consequences of starting this war at the midterm elections,” said Vali Nasr, an Iran expert and international relations professor at Johns Hopkins University. “The whole point Iran is making is that ‘We’re not going to let him decide the sort of ebb and flow of this war.’ Their position is ‘We have a vote here, and we’re not just going to make it convenient for him’”

In so doing, Iran is adopting the apparently effective tactic of weaponizing U.S. voters against an impotent president. The only difference between Carter and Trump at this point appears to be Trump’s bloviating, blustery fury as he threatens to “bomb the s—— out of” Oman if it “gets in the way” of efforts to end the conflict.

But of course, if Trump does turn up the heat with more bombings or even a ground invasion he risks raising more U.S. prices, more US soldiers coming home in boxes and looking even more old and impotent.

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