The Iran war and high gas prices are weighing down President Trump’s approval ratings.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The war with Iran began as an unpopular one here in the U.S., and the American public has not warmed to it a month in. A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week finds 61% of the respondents actively disapprove of the war. That’s up 18 percentage points from the earliest days. NPR’s Ron Elving joins us now. Ron, thanks so much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: What do you make of those numbers? I think we both recall that support for the Iraq War was in the 70s following the invasion.
ELVING: Yeah. Back in 2003, that’s right. Invading Iraq was popular at first, in part because the terror attacks of September 2001 were still so fresh. And in Iraq, there were clear objectives and some visible successes early on. Then things got bogged down and ground on for years, and support drained away. And by the way, people like Donald Trump at that time started saying the Iraq war was a mess and even claiming that they’d opposed it all along.
Now, Trump’s war on Iran has been different in the stated reasons for the attack have shifted and shifted again. It was about the nuclear program, then regime change, then back to nukes and missiles and destroying a weapons program that Trump had said the U.S. obliterated last year. Now, then the closure of the Strait of Hormuz brought the war home for drivers all over the world, including tens of millions of Americans, most especially farmers, whose costs for diesel fuel and fertilizer have far outstripped the big jump in gasoline. It’s not hard to see how that’s going to affect food prices as well.
SIMON: Reuters points to Iran and the economy for President Trump’s lowest job approval rating so far, just 36%.
ELVING: Other polls show much the same, even the ones on Fox News. Trump was live on Fox this week calling in to complain about that. Overall, his polls are the worst of his second term so far and still trending lower. We mentioned energy and food prices, but there’s also widespread concern that this war has no clear end point, that the oil issue may be with us a while, and many Americans worry about the thousands of U.S. Marines and airborne troops now converging on that region.
SIMON: Ron, there was a hope this week for a deal on funding for the Department of Homeland Security. What happened?
ELVING: The deal made its way through the Senate this week with bipartisan support. It would have funded Homeland Security but not ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the Border Patrol. At the same time, it did not make the reforms that Democrats had insisted on, nor did it include Trump’s demands for unrelated subjects, changes to voting laws and rules for this November’s midterm elections. So Trump did not really get behind the deal, and some of the most conservative people in the House, the House Freedom Caucus, withheld their votes, as well.
Last night, the House passed its own version, which could fund all of Homeland Security with ICE and the Border Patrol for the next eight weeks. But unfortunately, the Senate has now left town for a two-week recess, meaning it’s not clear when they’ll take up that House bill or whether, indeed, they could pass it. And in the meantime, Trump has issued an executive order that the TSA officials should be paid from reserve department funds, money that’s been available throughout the six weeks of the shutdown to date. But as lines at airport have been historically long, now the president has seen fit to use those reserve funds to pay TSA workers, who’ve been going without a check.
SIMON: And, Ron, lastly this week, President Trump is putting – I’ll phrase it this way – his John Hancock on the Benjamins.
ELVING: This week, the White House said Trump’s signature would soon be on our folding money. You may recall six years ago Trump was also intent on having his name on the COVID relief checks that went out at the height of that pandemic. But there could be even a larger pattern here. Trump has also ordered up a gold commemorative coin with his likeness on it, and he’s torn down the East Wing of the White House for an enormous ballroom he now says the military had asked for. And he’s also put his name on the Washington cultural center that had been named for John F. Kennedy. And he’s renamed the Institute of Peace, the Donald Trump Institute of Peace.
SIMON: NPR senior contributor Ron Elving. Thanks so much, Ron.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott.
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