Foreign policy starts at home. For Trump, home is where his biggest political problem lies. The Jeffrey Epstein investigation looms large, but even that isn’t as massive a political liability as the affordability crisis, a major factor in his historically bad approval ratings. He’s desperate for a distraction.
I’m not about to argue that there’s one issue solely responsible for Trump going all in on neoconservative aggression. There are many relevant factors, evidenced by Trump transparently fighting a war for oil companies in Venezuela, the performative aspect of his broader foreign policy, and the long-standing status of the United States as an imperial power. Rather, my argument is that wars abroad can distract from problems at home, that this function is Trump’s intent, and that it’s a key part of the administration’s strategy. We’re witnessing a violent, cynical act of political self-preservation.
Trump is using war to divert the public’s attention away from his inability to govern. Here are three reasons why.
1) Trump Has Failed to Address Voters’ Top Concern
Affordability — the trendy term for economic security, referring to one’s ability to reliably make ends meet — is deteriorating in the United States, and it has been since roughly early 2022. It’s been voters’ top concern for about as long. In July 2022, YouGov added “inflation/prices” as an option in its near-weekly survey on what issue Americans say is the most important. This analog for affordability immediately became the most popular selection. Analyzing the polling data, I reported last month that US voters had ranked affordability as their top concern for forty-one months straight. It’s now been forty-two consecutive months.
If voters had no longer had a problem affording increasingly high costs, they wouldn’t still rank it as their top concern. But since they do, they do. The polling data’s message is that Trump has failed to fix the issue
Auteur: Stephen Semler
