Can Trump Wriggle Out One Last Time?

On Oct. 1, 2016, Jesse Farrar, then a freelance scribe for sites like Vice and Deadspin, issued a tweet that would define the next 10 years of American politics. I’ll reproduce it as a poem:

Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!

*Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily*

Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

Three months out from the midterm election, five months into a stalemated (at best) war of choice with the Islamic Republic of Iran, we are back once again in the territory of Farrar’s first verse. Trump’s approval rating has reached a second-term nadir. His attempts to shake free of his unwise Middle Eastern war have been repeatedly frustrated by a counterparty in Tehran that doesn’t think it needs to take his deal. And the Trumpified Republican Party is in real danger of losing the Senate, with reddish seats from Iowa to Texas to Alaska increasingly vulnerable.

His health permitting, Trump is going to be president through 2028; in that bare sense he will presumably survive this moment as he has survived many times before.

But a true Trumpian “wriggles his way out” resolution requires Republicans to avoid catastrophe in November, to keep the Senate as they did in the 2018 midterms, and thereby preserve a certain freedom of movement for the president in the second half of his second term. It also requires him to remain popular enough — 40 percent approval would do it, 30 percent would not — to make people believe and behave as though an anointed heir might actually succeed him in the White House. There’s no room for even a modest Trumpian comeback if the entire political world spends the next two years positioning itself for an age of certain Democratic power and revenge.

So what might improve Trump’s position now? The obvious answer is the deal with the Iranians that the administration has been seeking and promising for months. (As of this writing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is the latest administration official to suggest that it might be just a day or two away.)

One of Trump’s political strengths is his willingness to cut bait on an unsuccessful policy, to sell a walkback as a victory rather than doubling or trebling down. That’s what I’ve expected him to do with Iran ever since the initial regime change hopes disappeared, and since Americans never really bought into the case for war in the first place, even a bad deal should help the White House’s political position through the effect on gas prices alone. (You could see Trump’s poll numbers tick upward following the all-too-temporary truce that Vice President JD Vance negotiated in June.)

But the Iranian regime can see the midterms looming just as much as any American politico, and having held out this long they have strong incentives to hold out even longer, since every poll showing a Democratic candidate leading in Texas or Alaska is a new forcing mechanism for Trumpian concessions. So it’s quite possible that the administration will be required to choose between a truly desperate deal or no pre-midterm peace at all.

In that Middle Eastern scenario, Trump’s position at home could still theoretically be saved by the Democratic Party’s mix of radicalism and inertia — the rise of socialist and socialist-adjacent candidates and the failure of the party’s moderates to meaningfully adapt to the realities that drove its 2024 defeat.

Again and again, the folly of his domestic opponents has been crucial to Trump’s rebounds and escapes. Before the Iran war began, that was roughly what I expected to happen yet again in 2026: a collision between an unpopular president and an unpopular opposition party yielding a split decision, a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, rather than an anti-Trumpian landslide.

I still think the trajectory of the Democratic Party is carrying Democrats away from the political center, which all things being equal should put a limit on how many close elections they can win. But all things aren’t equal when the president’s approval ratings are sinking into the 30s. In that environment, you can win even with further-left candidates and also expand the map so that your unforced errors don’t matter as much. If you can’t win narrowly with a candidate like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, you can lose narrowly with him and still pull off upsets in states like Ohio and Iowa where you have less polarizing nominees.

Then if we set aside Iranian conciliation and Democratic radicalism as saviors for the Trump administration’s political position, I’m not sure what remains.

Some unlooked-for crisis or debacle that reminds Americans of what they fear about progressivism? It’s hard to imagine what could have that effect when conservatives control every branch of government.

A sweeping, pandering reversal on tariffs by the president that cuts prices and sends the markets surging even higher? It’s hard to imagine Trump making that kind of concession to reality given everything we know about his second-term state of mind.

A speech announcing that the deep state is aware of the existence of extraterrestrial or nonhuman intelligence? The U.F.O. people are hoping for that before the midterms, but I’m not sure it would move his poll numbers in the Midwest.

Yes, it’s awfully hard to see how Donald Trump can wriggle out of this jam. And by the time November arrives, maybe I’ll summon enough courage to predict boldly that he won’t.

Breviary

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Julia M. Klein on W.H. Auden’s messy life.

T.J. Clark on the paintings in the caves.