U.S. President Donald Trump at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, U.S., April 10, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Almost 15 months into his second presidency and less than seven months away from the United States' 2026 midterms, Donald Trump continues to face low approval ratings in poll after poll. And the Iran war, launched in late February, is not helping his popularity.
In a biting opinion column published on April 15, the New York Times' Jamelle Bouie lays out a variety of ways in which Trump "is in far over his head" — and the Iran war is at the top of the list.
"The president is struggling with the consequences of his actions, raging in protest of the fact that for all its firepower, the United States cannot bomb Tehran into submission," Bouie argues. "When Trump launched his 'short-term excursion' into Iran, he assumed that it would be — in the words of a Pentagon official in the last Republican administration to launch a Middle East war — a 'cakewalk.' That, as Trump's own intelligence agencies told him, was a mistake. Now, he is stuck. And he lacks the skill and patience to find a way out of his self-inflicted catastrophe."
Bouie adds, "Unable to will a better outcome into existence — there are limits to the power of positive thinking — and frustrated by his own impotence, his response, familiar to anyone who must manage the emotions of a young child, is to throw a tantrum."
The more Trump lashes out at his foes, Bouie contends, the weaker he looks.
"Over the last few days," the liberal columnist observes, "Trump has denounced 'the Fake News Media' as 'CRAZY, or just plain CORRUPT!' for its reporting on the war. He attacked Pope Leo XIV in a bizarre rant calling him 'WEAK on Crime' and 'terrible for Foreign Policy.' And he posted an AI image of himself as Jesus, surrounded by devotees, healing an unnamed man. This is not a man in control of himself, or a president in control of the situation around him."
Trump, according to Bouie, is flailing with both foreign and domestic policy.
"Politically, the president's unilateralism has been a disaster," Bouie writes. "His universal tariffs — a vanity project as much as an economic program — are a drag on both the economy and his approval rating. The same goes for his immigration policies, which also started with a broad assertion of executive authority. They then produced an enormous backlash from Americans under siege by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Customs and Border Protection…. There is a decent chance that Trump is the beginning of something, and not the end. But if we can escape these years intact and respond accordingly, we may find that Trump stands less as an example and more as a cautionary tale of what happens when you embraces unaccountable, unilateral authority. In the end, it just doesn't work."
