Opinion | Tariffs, Truth Social And Total War: The Three T’s Of A Trumpian World

15 months into his second term, Trump is fighting a war in Iran, a global trade battle, & his poll numbers. He promised to win everything at once, but is now losing on every front.

There is a particular kind of political vertigo that sets in when a leader confuses audacity with strategy. Donald Trump entered his second term in January 2025 with a governing theory built on maximum pressure applied everywhere at once: tariffs to rebuild American industry, executive muscle to bend institutions into shape, and military force to reorder the Middle East. The theory was that momentum itself would be enough, that adversaries, trading partners, and domestic critics would simply fold under the weight of a relentless offensive.

The opening months projected command. World leaders arrived at the White House in a procession that Trump stage-managed for maximum effect, tariff threats were issued as diplomatic ultimatums, and the Oval Office became a backdrop for a presidency that confused the appearance of leverage with leverage itself. It looked, briefly, like a demonstration of strength. It was, in retrospect, a demonstration of appetite.

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Fourteen months later, that theory is in serious trouble. Trump is entering mid-April 2026 with an approval rating hovering near the lowest sustained levels of his second term. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS put his overall approval at 35 per cent, a point off his all-time low.

The decline has been coming for some time and is a visual symptom of the diseases that have plagued Donald Trump’s presidency. It maps precisely onto the three defining crises of Trump’s second chapter: the tariff war, the Iran conflict, and the social media meltdowns that have turned his Truth Social platform into a real-time chronicle of a presidency under strain.

Tariffs: A Victory Claimed, Then Overturned

The trade offensive began with genuine ambition. Trump arrived in the Oval Office convinced that America had been systematically exploited by its trading partners for decades, and that blunt tariffs were the corrective tool which previous administrations had lacked the balls to apply. From January to April 2025, the overall average effective US tariff rate rose from 2.5 per cent to an estimated 27 per cent, which was the highest in over a century.

The centrepiece of the magnanimous thinking was something which the White House branded “Liberation Day" tariffs, sweeping levies applied on all goods from nearly all countries under emergency powers of authority.

The confrontation with China defined everything. Trump raised tariffs on China by 145 percentage points by April 2025, and by June, US imports from China were roughly half of what they were a year earlier. They had fallen to depths not seen since the 2009 financial crisis. Beijing, an economic power coming into its own, responded not just with reciprocal tariffs but with a weapon Washington had dismissed: rare-earth export restrictions.

When China restricted exports of rare earth permanent magnets, monthly shipments to the United States fell to nearly zero in May. Cut off from essential inputs, the US automobile industry went into panic mode. “We have had to shut down factories. It’s hand-to-mouth right now," Ford chief executive Jim Farley said in June last year, with over 800,000 workers in automotive supply chains feeling the shock.

The legal architecture then collapsed. In February 2026, the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 ruling, found that Trump’s use of emergency powers to enact the tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act was not legal. The government estimated it had collected $166 billion from more than 330,000 businesses in tariffs that the court subsequently found unconstitutional. Trump scrambled to rebuild his trade framework on other statutory grounds, announcing a new 10 per cent global tariff under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.

It was a strikingly reduced position from his peak ambitions. In March 2026, the administration announced new investigations into allegedly unfair trading practices by China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Mexico, Japan, the European Union, and dozens of other economies. It was a sign that the trade agenda was being reset rather than concluded.

The costs have been absorbed unevenly. The Trump tariffs amount to the largest US tax increase as a percentage of GDP since 1993 and represent an average tax increase per US household of $1,500 in 2026. Consumer goods companies passed costs directly to shoppers. Procter & Gamble reported a $1 billion annual tariff impact, leading it to raise prices on a quarter of its product lines. The agricultural sector, a core constituency, bore particular damage. US soybean exports to China fell to $3 billion in 2025, their lowest level since 2018, despite the agreement Trump and Xi reached in the autumn.

China has also actively reduced its dependence on US farmers by buying more from Brazil and Argentina. The White House responded with up to $11 billion in farm subsidies, a ragtag solution for a crisis of its own making. A Trump–Xi summit is now scheduled for May 2026, a tacit acknowledgement that the trade war requires negotiated exits rather than clean victories.

Total War: Iran, Hormuz And The Limits Of Air Power

The Iran conflict opened on 28 February 2026 in circumstances that have since become deeply contested. The United States and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, targeting military and government sites, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and other senior officials, and inflicting civilian casualties. The surprise attacks were launched during ongoing negotiations between Iran and the US. Tehran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly 20 per cent of the world’s oil and natural gas transits, triggering a global energy shock.

The military campaign escalated rapidly. Admiral Brad Cooper stated that the US military had struck more than 8,000 Iranian military targets, including 130 vessels. On 21 March, the US conducted strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility using bunker-buster bombs. B-52 bombers flew over Iranian territory for the first time, projecting air supremacy. Yet the primary stated objective of eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, remained elusive. Peace talks broke down over a programme that had survived more than five weeks of sustained bombing, a result that raised uncomfortable questions about the strategic calculation underpinning the entire campaign.

The war’s domestic political costs arrived faster than its strategic dividends. Nearly 2,076 people have been killed in Iran since the start of the war, with 13 US military personnel also dead. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused petrol prices to skyrocket across the United States, where Trump faced growing domestic criticism, including from within his conservative base.

The administration’s handling of the war’s most dramatic moment illustrated how deeply Trump’s decision-making had become entangled with his social media presence. On the evening of 7 April, with a major bombing campaign hours away, Trump took to Truth Social to warn that “a whole civilisation will die tonight" if Tehran did not comply with his demands, before reversing course within hours and announcing a two-week suspension of the bombing campaign following mediation by Pakistan.

The ceasefire was real, the Strait reopened under coordination with Iranian armed forces, but the manner of its announcement, a late-night social media post reversing a threat made on that same platform hours earlier, left allies and adversaries alike uncertain whether they were watching statecraft or improv comedy at the highest level of government.

Truth Social: The Platform Is The Symptom

Truth Social was designed as a megaphone. It has become something closer to a diagnostic tool, revealing, in real time, the psychological temperature of a presidency under simultaneous stress. Trump lashed out in a series of overnight Truth Social posts in mid-April, revealing what was keeping him awake in attacks directed at critics of his Iran war, his fights with NATO, and Pope Leo XIV. In one post, he accused NATO of failing to support the Iran operation, writing: “None of these people, including our own, very disappointing, NATO, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them."

The feud with Pope Leo proved to be a particularly revealing episode. Trump described the newly elected pontiff as “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy", and claimed the pope had only been appointed because he was American, which the Church thought would be the best way to manage Trump. He also stated that he preferred the pope’s brother because he was “all MAGA". The pope’s measured response only intensified the feud.

Then came the image. Trump drew widespread backlash after posting an AI-generated image that appeared to show him dressed as Jesus Christ, wearing a white robe and red shawl, healing a man while surrounded by adoring figures, including a nurse and a soldier, with military jets and eagles framing the composition. Iran’s diplomatic missions responded swiftly. Iran’s embassy in Tajikistan posted an AI-generated video of Jesus Christ striking Trump, using the same imagery from Trump’s own Truth Social post as its source material. Iranian embassies across the region engaged in an extended social media campaign mocking the president, deploying AI-generated content that turned his own platforms against him.

The timing is not just comedic but an absolute derangement of a man who is also the President of the United States. When a foreign adversary under sustained military bombardment can effectively contest the information environment using a sitting president’s own posts as raw material, something has gone structurally wrong.

The Political Reckoning

The convergence of these three crises has produced a political situation that should concentrate minds in the White House as the 2026 midterm elections approach. CNN’s polling found Trump’s economic approval at a new second-term low of 31 per cent, with just 27 per cent approving of his handling of inflation, down from 44 per cent a year earlier. Chief data analyst Harry Enten noted that Trump’s disapproval on inflation now exceeds both Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden at comparable points in their presidencies.

Among independents, YouGov and Economist polling recorded Trump’s approval at 22 per cent in its most recent wave, down from 31 per cent in early March. A UMass Lowell/YouGov survey found 57 per cent of respondents saying their lives had become somewhat or much more difficult over the previous six months. Sixty-seven per cent said the country was on the wrong track.

The numbers point to something beyond a normal second-term correction. Trump’s model of governance, the aggressive, simultaneous offensive on multiple fronts, the deliberate cultivation of crisis as leverage, the use of social media as both weapon and theatre, is producing compounding liabilities rather than compounding victories.

The tariff regime has been partially invalidated by the Supreme Court. The Iran war has failed thus far to achieve its primary objective while raising petrol prices and military casualties. And Truth Social, the platform built to project dominance, is documenting its erosion.

The three T’s were meant to be instruments of transformation. They have become, instead, the three fronts on which Donald Trump’s second term is quietly, and very publicly, coming undone.

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