In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the George W Bush administration presented the case for war exhaustively, repeatedly, and in public. The then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who played a major role in green-lighting waterboarding of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, wrote an editorial in the New York Times claiming that Iraq was lying about its so-called “weapons of mass destruction”.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, went to a meeting of the United Nations security council in New York. There, before America and the world, he held up a tiny vial of substance meant to represent anthrax, a chemical weapon that had terrorized the US in a series of mail attacks just over a year before; Powell claimed that Iraq had the weapon and was willing to use it. Bush himself routinely addressed the American people, making the case for war. They were all lying, it turned out, but the lie served a purpose: it was a concession to the idea that the American people would have a say in whether or not their country went to war.

This time around, there has been no such concession. The Trump administration launched a war on Iran with no organized attempt to persuade the American public of the justice of their course of action, no effort to get the constitutionally required approval from Congress, and no attempt to put forward an even minimally coherent post-hoc rationalization for their decision. “Operation Epic Fury”, the inane name given to the war by Pete Hegseth’s Department of Defense, has now been explained as a response to Iranian aggression; as a check on Iran’s nuclear program (which Trump claimed to have “obliterated” with strikes last June); as self-defense; as not self-defense; and as something the United States had to do because Israel was planning to start a war anyway.

Other allies of the regime have claimed that really, the new escalation to military force was a mere acknowledgement of the reality that Iran had been at war with the United States for 47 years, an argument that quickly drew comparisons to the famous lie propagated by the regime of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984: “We have always been at war with Eurasia.”

One reason for this inability to articulate a rationale for Trump’s war of choice against Iran is that the real reason is inconvenient for Trump to admit: the war serves as a distraction. After all, as Trump heads into the 2026 midterm elections which will function as a referendum on his second term in office, his approval ratings are low, and getting lower; Trump has not had a net positive approval rating for over a year, and the war on Iran has so far failed to boost his numbers with any sort of rally-around-the-flag effect.

He remains broadly disliked, and it is the persistent contradiction of authoritarians that their ability to force their will on the public relies on having a substantial degree of the people’s goodwill behind them. Trump cannot consolidate his authoritarian regime because he is simply not popular enough to do so.

This essential weakness at the core of Trump’s regime is reinforced by a sagging economy. Though he draws his core support from the Maga movement’s libidinal investments in racist and sexist gratification, Trump won marginal voters in 2024 by riding a global wave of anti-establishment sentiment and by benefitting from a widespread sense of unease about inflation and a lukewarm jobs market.

But more than a year into Trump’s restoration, unemployment is America is surging: the most recent jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the US lost a staggering 92,000 jobs in February, and revised previous months’ estimations to paint a less rosy picture of the US economy.

Those numbers are not likely to improve any time soon: now that Trump has made an irrational and seemingly impulsive choice to wage war on Iran, surging oil prices and an Iranian blockade of the strait of Hormuz are likely to drive prices upward, make scared companies less eager to hire, and reverse what progress has been made to slow inflation.

Meanwhile, as the economy staggers and more and more Americans are out of work, Donald Trump’s domestic policy is unpopular, and his opponents are notching some wins. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration agents in Minneapolis, Democrats forced a partial shutdown of DHS funding in an attempt to force restrictions on the jackboots’ behavior. Trump was forced to dispense with his homeland security secretary in the midst of the controversy over the department’s actions.

Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing policy of “mass deportations” that Trump campaigned on in 2024 has created scenes of pointless cruelty and terror that have outraged the public. Even Republican politicians now oppose allowing DHS to build concentration camps for immigrants in their districts; meanwhile, the White House is quietly advising Republican congressional candidates to stop campaigning on “mass deportations” ahead of the midterms, an acknowledgement that the policy is a political failure.

More political failures are on the way. Something is rotten in the state of Maga: Trump’s allies, underlines, and viziers are at each other’s throats. Border czar Tom Homan won his turf war against Kristi Noem, but there is no guarantee that her replacement, Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, will be a more accommodating DHS secretary.

FBI director Kash Patel is infuriating agents and embarrassing his colleagues with his flagrant waste of taxpayer funds. Some House members, including women such as Nancy Mace, are attacking other Republicans over their sexual harassment of underlings, and the Epstein scandal continues to grab headlines.

Trump’s foreign adventures in places like Venezuela and now Iran has pleased neocons like Marco Rubio, but enraged anti-interventionist media personalities from the far right, such as Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson. Meanwhile, nobody in the administration seems to like JD Vance, who is rumored to be outraged by his exclusion from decision-making around the Iran deal, but the powerless and marginalized VP is the still the closest thing that an aging Trump has to an heir apparent. With the designated successor so obviously weak, other aspirants are sure to begin jockeying for the crown.

Why would Trump launch a foreign war when he is so domestically weak? Precisely because he is weak. Precisely because foreign military action is one of the few actions he is still able to take. He is a failing president with little room to maneuver, unable to organize his coalition, unable to consolidate his regime, and unable to effect his will. Many would-be authoritarians have believed that a quick and easy foreign war was just what they needed to rally their support at home. Trump should look up what happened to them.