In The Godfather, Michael Corleone informs Tom Hagen he is being reassigned ahead of a particularly violent stretch for the family.
“You’re not a wartime consigliere, Tom,” he said. “Things may get rough with the move we’re trying.”
The scene comes to mind as the Iran war hits the six-month mark and President Donald Trump continues to drive the national conversation but to no obvious benefit for himself or his party ahead of the midterm elections.
It would seem self-evident, even tautological, that Trump would be better off in a period of peace and prosperity rather than unpopular war. Wouldn’t any president or political leader?
But Trump’s political skills are especially unsuited to calming the nation in a period of crisis or urging Americans to stay the course during difficult times. This was his undoing in his first term and it could waste his second. He’s much better hyping good things happening under his watch and tearing down bad things being done by his opponents, often in an over-the-top fashion.
Presidents cannot always pick what will matter most during their time in office. But Trump’s crises—the Iran war and an unstable, erratic tariffs regime, both worsening the affordability crisis—are largely of his own choosing.
It is easy to imagine some of his most recent moves playing much differently if the public were happier with the state of the economy and satisfied with Trump’s handling of this top issue.
If this were the first-term Trump economy before the pandemic, with both low unemployment and low inflation, perhaps the Democrats would look like humorless scolds in response to his executive order renaming Lake Ontario. Lake America, hell yeah!
Instead, that order has become a symbol of a trade war with Canada that Trump has never fully explained and which looks like a grudge match with a Liberal prime minister he dislikes, within the broader context of public dissatisfaction with the cost of living.
During an economic boom, Trump’s recently published presidential rankings—seemingly cribbed from Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and his liberal historian buddies in 1948, with Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter thrown in for good measure—would seem like a fun afternoon internet distraction rather than a delusional exercise.
Of course, neither of these examples will be a major vote-mover, and the rankings remain closer to the ragebait they would be in the best of times. But trolling looks a lot better from a position of electoral strength.
Similarly, all of Trump’s legacy and DC beautification projects, including the White House ballroom, would be more politically defensible if voters weren’t worried about high gas prices.
On the economy, he is failing to do two things that Clinton—an average president, according to Trump’s own rankings—mastered long before the 1990s internet boom really took off: focus like a laser beam and feel the voters’ pain.
The latter is not really how Trump is wired while in charge, but he was at his best politically when selling his first-term economy and then diagnosing the ills of Biden’s.
Trump cannot help that much of the recent inflation occurred between his two terms and that prices were never going back down to 2019 levels barring an even worse economic catastrophe.
But Trump chose the Iran war and the tariffs. And while the tariffs in some form were always inevitable, the war was not. Whatever desire Trump had to get tougher with Iran than Obama, he did not have to create a global energy supply shock as inflation was coming down.
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Even the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s own sister, a political amateur, ran a campaign focused on affordability, not Iran or international affairs. But that is not the national political climate Trump has created for Republicans as Labor Day and, critically, Election Day near.
It’s true that some of Trump’s biggest accomplishments have been achieved through brute force: securing the border, routing the terrorist group ISIS, cleaning up parts of DC. But not everything can be done this way, and all of them were more focused than Trump’s haphazard approach to Iran and trade.
Trump has chosen to be a wartime president, without a vote of Congress. But in the Tom Hagen sense, he is not one. Both he and the country would be much better off if he realized that fact.
