Trump’s Tariffs Hurt Republicans Long Before the Iran War

In his defense of the argument that Republican travails are entirely about (and, for that matter, only about the war and not about its execution or the botched cease-fire) — and that anyone pointing to the damage done by the Trump tariff policy for nearly a year before the war is “gaslighting” — Michael Brendan Dougherty points to : “Going from 47 approval on Inauguration Day to stabilizing at 40 isn’t optimal. But dropping to 33 by August of 2026 is catastrophic.”

I don’t know what polls he is looking at. If you browse the RealClearPolitics average, Trump started his honeymoon at 50.4 percent on January 28, 2025, was at 49.4 percent a month later, but ended at 39.1 percent approval on Election Day, after having bottomed out at 37.8 percent on October 10. In the month before the war’s initiation on February 28, he was consistently between 42 percent and 44 percent, where he’d mostly been since November 2025. He was at 43.5 percent the day the war was launched. True, that understates the problem a bit, because his disapproval numbers rose as 2026 wore on, but the bulk of the damage was already done in 2025. As I tracked the chronology back in May:

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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In his defense of the argument that Republican travails are entirely about (and, for that matter, only about the war and not about its execution or the botched cease-fire) — and that anyone pointing to the damage done by the Trump tariff policy for nearly a year before the war is “gaslighting” — Michael Brendan Dougherty points to : “Going from 47 approval on Inauguration Day to stabilizing at 40 isn’t optimal. But dropping to 33 by August of 2026 is catastrophic.”

I don’t know what polls he is looking at. If you browse the RealClearPolitics average, Trump started his honeymoon at 50.4 percent on January 28, 2025, was at 49.4 percent a month later, but ended at 39.1 percent approval on Election Day, after having bottomed out at 37.8 percent on October 10. In the month before the war’s initiation on February 28, he was consistently between 42 percent and 44 percent, where he’d mostly been since November 2025. He was at 43.5 percent the day the war was launched. True, that understates the problem a bit, because his disapproval numbers rose as 2026 wore on, but the bulk of the damage was already done in 2025. As I tracked the chronology back in May: