A tide of political danger is rising around President Trump as criticism grows that he may be losing control of the war in Iran.
The conflict that he started almost three weeks ago, in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was a war of choice. But even a weakened regime in Tehran still has some choices of its own.
The way it exercises those options has already inflicted economic pain on the United States and the world — and caused Trump real problems.
Within the past 24 hours, global energy prices were given yet another jolt by attacks and counterattacks in the Middle East. Later, multiple media outlets reported that an American F-35 fighter jet had to make an emergency landing amid suspicions it had been hit by Iranian fire.
In the first instance, Israel hit the huge South Pars gas field off the coast of Iran, from which the Islamic Republic is estimated to derive around three-quarters of all its gas. In retaliation, Iran hit a Qatari natural gas processing complex, as well as oil refineries in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Those events roiled energy markets and spurred Trump onto social media.
He wrote on Truth Social that Israel had struck “out of anger for what has taken place in the Middle East,” then claimed that the United States “knew nothing” about the attack — an assertion met with doubt among some experts and contradicted by reporting later Thursday from The Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Trump pledged there would be no further Israeli attacks on the gas field unless Iran escalated in Qatar. But if Tehran instead chose the latter course, the U.S. would “blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen,” he wrote.
The markets remain highly volatile.
The price of Brent crude oil spiked to more than $118 after the attacks, although it tapered off to around $107 by approximately 5 p.m. EDT Thursday. Just one month ago, the price was roughly $70.
The rise in oil prices has been reflected in prices at the pump for Americans. The national average for a gallon of gas was $3.88 on Thursday, according to AAA. That’s an increase of approximately 95 cents since a month ago.
There are also worries about a broader rise in inflation, driven by rising fuel costs.
Trump played down the price increases while meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi at the White House on Thursday.
“I thought it would be worse — much worse, actually,” Trump told reporters. “It’s not bad, and it’s going to be over with pretty soon.”
But others see political peril looming.
Grant Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said that although much of the reaction to the conflict so far has been bifurcated along partisan lines, “I do think it’s a particular moment of danger [for Trump]. Up to now, there has been this drip-drip-drip erosion in the president’s support. This one, to me, has more of a potential to open up a floodgate.”
Reeher cited the key pitfalls as being the price of oil and its ramifications, the potential negative knock-on effects on financial markets, and the possibility of the conflict expanding across the region or dragging on.
Trump’s political vulnerability is also made more acute because the war has never been popular.
In this regard it is different even from the most contentious conflicts of the modern era. The wars in Iraq and, a generation before, in Vietnam enjoyed broad public support initially, even though this backing eroded enormously over time.
Further aggravating the political turmoil for Trump are the tensions the conflict has wrought within his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement.
The extent of the split is hotly debated, and Trump loyalists point to polls that show an overwhelming majority of MAGA backers support the military operation in Iran.
That being said, criticism from usually Trump-friendly media figures including Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Joe Rogan will at least reach the president’s base in a way more liberal critiques do not.
The debate on the right was sharpened further when Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center director, Joe Kent, quit over the war earlier this week. His letter of resignation alleged that Israeli officials and American media figures had conspired to “deceive” Trump into war.
That being said, some more mainstream Republicans look at the fractious intra-MAGA debates with skepticism.
“Much of that space has people whose strongly held principles are actually very malleable, saw something in Trump that wasn’t there, or both,” said Doug Heye, a former communications director for the Republican National Committee. “If elected Republicans flip, that will tell us more than a staffer resigning and then doing interviews.”
Heye also said that it remained “too early to tell” whether events in Iran were slipping out of Trump’s grasp.
The war will reach its three-week mark Saturday. To be sure, it is possible that conditions on the ground could change in Trump’s favor, perhaps abruptly.
If American and Israeli airstrikes were to succeed in unblocking the vital Strait of Hormuz, Iran would be deprived of one of its last and strongest cards.
The regime itself could teeter, too. During the White House meeting with Takaichi, both Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Trump himself suggested they were seeing “defections” from the ruling regime in Tehran and its military ranks.
Bessent even predicted that “the regime will probably collapse within itself,” though Trump did not appear to explicitly endorse this claim.
In the meantime, Trump and his allies are berating the media for what they see as insufficient attention being paid to the successes of the war effort.
During a media briefing Thursday morning, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth complained about a “dishonest and anti-Trump press,” which he said acted “to downplay progress, amplify every cost and call into question every step.”
“We’re winning decisively and on our terms,” Hegseth insisted.
But with no sign yet of Iran’s overall governing structure crumbling, traditional U.S. allies stiff-arming Trump’s request for help on the Strait of Hormuz and gas prices rising at home, that message isn’t one that most Americans are endorsing.
An Economist/YouGov poll earlier this week asked whether people approved or disapproved of how Trump was handling the situation in Iran.
Only 36 percent of respondents approved. Fifty-six percent disapproved.
That’s bad news for the White House by any measure.
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