By: Marcus Sterling – SeaPRwire – Trump’s approval number just touched the bottom of his second term. A Reuters-Ipsos poll finished on 17 August puts him at 33 percent. That matches the low he hit in February 2017 during the first term. Sixty-four percent now disapprove. At the same time nearly eight in ten Americans say they expect the conflict with Iran to drag on. The two numbers sit side by side for a reason. Voters are connecting the length of the fight to the pain at the pump and the broken campaign promise of short wars.
The poll itself is straightforward. It ran for four days and ended 17 August. Only 33 percent of respondents approved of Trump’s performance in the White House. Sixty-four percent disapproved. That is the lowest mark of the current term and equals the previous floor set in early 2017. On the war question the split is even clearer. About 80 percent of all adults—87 percent of Democrats and 71 percent of Republicans—believe the fighting between the United States and Iran “will last a long time.” Just 16 percent still think it “might end in a few weeks.” The sample covered 1,166 American adults and was conducted online. Those are the raw figures released by Reuters and Ipsos.
The economic layer sits directly on top of the same data. Since the late-February joint U.S.-Israeli military action against Iran, one-fifth of global oil trade has been disrupted. Gasoline prices have climbed. Ordinary households feel the pressure. Trump campaigned on controlling inflation and avoiding drawn-out wars. In early March he said the conflict with Iran would last only a few weeks. The fighting has already run longer than that statement. The poll captures the public reaction to the gap between the promise and the timeline. High disapproval and the near-universal expectation of a long war now form a single political fact. The November midterms will measure how much weight that fact carries.
Domestic support is thinning under the combined load of duration and price. The approval drop is not abstract. It tracks the same weeks in which fuel costs rose and the short-war claim aged. The practical next reading is simple: watch the gasoline price trajectory and the midterm ballot lines in districts most exposed to energy costs. Those two indicators will show whether the 33 percent floor holds or keeps sliding.
Author bio: Marcus Sterling, a geopolitical commentator whose columns appear regularly in major international newspapers and focus on alliance friction and great-power signaling.
source https://newsroom.seaprwire.com/contributors/marcus-sterling/trumps-approval-hits-the-floor-as-eight-in-ten-americans-brace-for-a-long-iran-war/