Trump is losing his grip — and even Republicans are catching on

U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he walks after exiting Marine One on the South Lawn while returning to the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Nathan Howard

What’s the old saying about the definition of crazy? Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results, right? Well, that’s where we are with the president’s war against Iran. He’s clearly insane. The only question is when enough people figure it out.

On Sunday morning, Donald Trump posted on his social media site that if Iran does not accept a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the United States “is going to knock out every single power plant, and every single bridge, in Iran. NO MORE MR NICE GUY!”

For those who are keeping track, this is the third time since the war began that Trump has promised to commit war crimes and other atrocities if the Iranians do not accept his "give-me-everything" terms. The last one included threats to murder their “whole civilization.”

This time, like the last time, the Iranians are almost certainly not going to behave differently. They are going to continue throttling that narrow gap in the Persian Gulf, therefore throttling the global economy, in order to pressure the president into accepting terms favorable to them. Short of invasion, the only thing Trump can do is pretend he’s winning.

Speaking of pretending to win, that’s why Trump issues his threats on Sundays. It’s the day when futures markets open. Investors want the Iran war to end. They want desperately for the world's supply of oil to return to normal. With his Sunday threats, the president strings them along, giving them just enough hope to prevent oil prices from soaring for the week.

There’s another thing about pretending to win. Trump has bullied Iran into surrendering on Sundays, but on the previous Fridays, he has acted like it already has. Again, this is for investors watching the week’s events, especially the fact that Iran’s behavior hasn’t changed.

So the pattern should be clear: Donald Trump puts on his “No more Mr Nice Guy” act on Sundays to impress futures traders, but Iran keeps squeezing oil flows during the week, panicking regular Wall Street traders. By the end of the week, all Donald Trump can do is lie.

The president has been running the same play over and over, since mid-March, but the result that ultimately matters has been identical. Iran has shut the Strait of Hormuz (or it’s charging millions in tolls for safe passage). The regime is unmoved by Trump's “madman” shtick – and yet he keeps trying. The more he does, the more his sanity should be an open question.

The Times usually sanewashes Trump’s cognitive decline, but the gravity of the Iran War along with emerging indications that a global energy shock is building, seem to have forced a change of tack at the paper of record. Peter Baker, who covered Joe Biden’s aging perhaps more zealously than anyone else in Washington, compared Trump to the former president.

For the frontpage, Baker wrote that “while the country has had presidents whose capacity came under question before, most recently the octogenarian Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he aged demonstrably before the public’s eyes, never in modern times has the stability of a president been so publicly and forensically debated — and with such profound consequences.”

President Biden wasn’t insane. Nor was he senile or demented. He was just old. However, that the Times is comparing Trump’s mental fitness to his suggests that the moneyed elites who read the Times, and who see their interests reflected on its pages, are getting very worried.

They are finally catching up to everyone else.

The president’s economic policies – illegal taxes and illegal deportations, as well as tax cuts for the rich – were already burning up middle- and working-class Americans. The soaring price of gas, which is driving up the price of everything else, is burning them up more.

NBC News found that 67 percent disapprove of the war, with 54 percent who “strongly disapprove.” On inflation, Harry Enten said, “Trump is in his worst position ever on the issue that the American people say over and over and over again is their key number one."

“Remember, Trump got re-elected to a second term and Joe Biden got pushed to the curb in large part because Americans felt he couldn't handle inflation,” CNN's Enten said today. “Trump was more trusted than Kamala Harris on inflation by seven points. Look at his net approval right now. You average all those polls on the right side of your screen, 42 points underwater. That is a nearly 50-point shift away from the president of the United States."

In Enten’s view, Biden was deemed too old to handle inflation. Americans pushed him out. Now, however, we are seeing conditions emerging in which the same thing can be said of Donald Trump. Voters can’t push him out, though, only his party. Enten isn’t alone in saying the question isn’t whether Republican control of the Congress is doomed. It’s by how much.

I think we are seeing the beginning of a trend. The more the Iran war drags on, and the more pain that Americans feel as a consequence of it, the more openly people are going to doubt Trump’s mental fitness. They will increasingly compare him to the conventional wisdom about Biden. Baker’s piece foreshadows the discourse we could see after the midterms.

If Donald Trump loses the House, not to mention the Senate, he will be not only a lame duck but a toxic one. Few will have much use for him. Not even loyalists will stay loyal. They will insist that they haven’t changed. They will insist that it’s the president who has changed.

He was sane in the beginning, but not now.

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