How far will he go?

Image: The White House / source: Wikimedia Commons

George Blecher

17 March 2026

While Trump’s violence has never been purely rhetorical, few anticipated his eagerness to use military force since returning to power. Do Americans share their president’s growing bellicosity? And what if they decide they don’t?

Donald Trump has never been good at keeping secrets. Like a child who can’t hide his mischief, he winks, smirks, drops hints and makes offhand threats that seem outrageous at the time but later turn out to have been meant completely seriously.

If we’d listened more carefully to Trump’s ominous rhetoric during his nearly two-hour-long State of the Union speech on 24 February, we might have detected hints of what was to come.

During the course of the evening, at least seven medals were awarded, two of which were the nation’s highest military award – the Medal of Honor. Trump gave a lengthy account of the ‘brilliance’ of Operation Absolute Resolve, the campaign that kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. In language more appropriate to a lurid war novel than a presidential address, he lauded the bravery of the lead helicopter pilot whose legs were ‘shredded in several places … gushing blood, which was flowing back down the aisle’.

If that weren’t enough, Trump turned to several people in the gallery and described in gory detail how they or their close relatives had been harmed by ‘illegal aliens’ – a child run over by a truck driver with an illegal license, a capitol guard crippled by a bullet from an illegal handgun, a young woman found ‘dead in a bathtub, bleeding profusely, after being stabbed 25 times. Violently and viciously’.

With its bellicose language, the State of the Union speech was a show suggestive of a returning Roman army. Only, instead of celebrating the end of a victorious campaign, the speech hinted at the beginning of what could turn out to be a costly, drawn-out, and self-defeating misstep, much like all the other American military engagements of the past half-century.

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Trump’s Iran war is not going as well as he apparently expected.

Though American and Israeli air power have control of Iranian air space, the Gulf of Hormuz is 90% impassable, and nations are reluctant to help the US defend the waterway from Iranian attacks. Petrol prices in the US and over the world have risen steadily. Trump has been forced to lift sanctions on Russian oil to allow it to flow to India and potentially elsewhere, as well as to offer the US Navy as escorts to international oil tankers; so far, no vessel has taken up his offer. The Iranians show no inclination to surrender and their strategically astute response appears to have taken Trump and his advisors by surprise. American missiles have proved to be not as accurate as the administration claims; the press reports evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties, including the 150 young girls killed when a Tomahawk missile hit their school in Minab, southern Iran.

Polls indicate that the war is unpopular among Americans. A range of 54% to 59% oppose it, though sentiment breaks down along the usual political lines. Eighty-six percent of Democrats are against the war while 84% of Republicans support it; 66% of Independents are also opposed. While many Americans support regime change, others are disturbed by the overstepping of national sovereignty and the consequent uncertainty. A bill demanding that Trump get Congressional authorization for the assault on Iran failed in both the Senate and House.

The media continue to speculate on why Trump initiated an attack with no apparent follow-up or endgame. Parallels to George W. Bush’s Iraq war are inevitable. Did Netanyahu finally convince the US President to buy into his vision of ‘cleansing’ the whole Middle East? Was there any evidence at all that Iran posed an ‘imminent threat’ to the US and its allies? Is the continued bombing of Iran part of a long-range strategy to deprive China of oil imports? Or was it just the latest act of a rogue president whose actions have become more and more impulsive?

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Whatever else one can say about Trump 2.0, it is clear that he hardly resembles the Trump of 2016–2020. The first-term Trump who was reluctant if not downright timid about using military force has been replaced by a gung-ho autocrat whose use of force this past year has been nothing short of breathtaking. In addition to Iran, a list of other countries that experienced American incursions in 2025 and 2026 includes Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, Ecuador and, most spectacularly, Venezuela.

Equally disturbing were Trump’s pronouncements about future incursions and other acts of aggression: threats to buy or seize Greenland and reclaim the Panama Canal; fantasies about making Canada the 51st State; a full-scale embargo of medical and fuel supplies to Cuba; and the so-called American Counter Cartel Coalition, a hastily-convened meeting of nations whose ostensible goal is to eliminate drug cartels in Columbia and Mexico – two countries with which Trump shares increasingly chilly relations.

But in this latest show of force, the President may have bitten off more than he can chew. His personal popularity is waning. At this point, only 38% of American think Trump is doing a good job, including an all-time low approval rating of 22% among Independents.

In addition to growing anger over ICE’s treatment of undocumented immigrants, Americans are unhappy about the economy. The many falsehoods and exaggerations Trump offered in the State of the Union speech could not conceal that the economy appears to be on the brink of a downturn. Latest statistics for new jobs indicate a drop of 92,000 last month, the first downward trend in several years, with the public and healthcare sectors most heavily affected. Inflation has ticked up to 4.4%. Defaults on mortgages, credit cards and student loans have reached an all-time high; almost 5% of all American households are delinquent on some sort of loan. The stock market – Trump’s favourite bell-weather of a burgeoning economy – has dropped at least 1000 points since the beginning of the war.

Another of Trump’s nagging problems is the Epstein files. They simply won’t go away. Recent scrutiny by the press uncovered new files with the President at the centre. The Justice Department has admitted that it possesses transcribed interviews with a woman who says she was raped as a 13-year-old in the 1980s by both Trump and Epstein. Though officials promise to release the interviews to the Congressional Oversight committee, no action has thus far been taken.

In addition to the possibility that the nation’s highest executive may have raped a teenage girl, the continued outrage over the Epstein files might best be understood as anger toward all of Epstein’s cronies. On both the political left and the right, they represent a stratum of American society that seems to believe it is above the law and conventional morality. Though Americans are dazzled by the Rich and Famous, we are also repelled by them. It may be this egalitarian side of the American character that keeps coming back to the Epstein files for evidence of Trump’s transgressions – and, perhaps more importantly, his cavalier attitude toward them.

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A final alarming note from the 2026 State of the Union address: buried in the wish-list that all presidents include in such speeches was a request by Trump to pass the Save America Act, a piece of legislation requiring all registered voters to show proof of citizenship and bring photo IDs to the polls. The bill is clearly directed at poor and minority voters without easy access to the necessary documents – and who most likely vote Democratic. In the speech Trump added a wish for a bill to eliminate virtually all absentee voting.

Though this bill and a similar one have already cleared the House, passage in the Senate requires a 60-vote majority, and thus far the Majority Leader has resisted efforts from the Far Right to force a vote. Both Trump and his base have reason to be worried. The Iran war is unpopular and can only get more so; the economy is shaky, especially at the lower end; Trump has lost supporters among the swing contingent that got him re-elected; and continuing interest in the Epstein files suggests that even though millions of Americans admire the President’s flag-waving bravado, something in them finds the man reprehensible.

In other words: the Save America Act and others like it are a reflection of the Right’s growing panic.

But the Left is also worried. How far is Trump capable of going in order to hold onto power in the November mid-terms? Though the Constitution is clear about the responsibility for conducting elections residing with the states, not the federal government, will he attempt to declare a national emergency, summon troops to ‘guard’ the polling places and impound the voting machines? If the Democrats unseat a pivotal number of Republicans in the House, will he instruct the losing representatives not to step down?

Published 17 March 2026

Original in English

First published by Eurozine

© George Blecher

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