The debacle of the Iran war and the economic failure of the tariff policy have created a crisis for the already unstable Trump regime, which makes it all the more dangerous, argues John Clarke

The sea of troubles that the Trump administration is navigating its way through continues to get stormier with every passing month. At the same time, Trump’s own blustering style and his constant readiness to denounce and accuse those who criticise or oppose him only add to the sense of chaos and uncertainty.

On 13 April, Yahoo News reported that former CIA director John Brennan had called for the use of the 25^th Amendment to remove Trump from office. This constitutional provision offers a means to ditch a US president who is deemed unfit to hold office. ‘I think the 25th Amendment was written with Donald Trump in mind,’ he stated, also suggesting that ‘allowing someone like Donald to continue as commander-in-chief could have catastrophic consequences.’

Calls for Trump to be forced out have been based on both the decisions he has made, particularly with regard to the assault on Iran, and the offensive and irrational social-media posts he continues to put out on a regular basis.

As reported by NBC News the week before, some seventy Democrat legislators had already ‘called for President Donald Trump to be removed from office … after he used extreme rhetoric against Iran that included threatening to wipe out “a whole civilization”.’ They suggested that Trump’s cabinet could invoke the 25^th Amendment or that Congress could initiate impeachment proceedings against him.

Going one step further, as Common Dreams notes, Rep. Jamie Raskin has now ‘unveiled legislation that would establish a congressional commission tasked with determining whether the president is able to continue executing the duties of the office.’ This initiative has won the support of fifty House Democrats who have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill.

Serious instability

There is, of course, very little prospect of any immediate effort to evict Trump from the White House having any prospect of success. However, such calls for his removal do reflect a growing awareness of a very serious level of instability within his administration that is far from likely to improve as Trump’s term in office continues to play out.

Opinion polls have been registering a decline in Trump’s popularity for some time, but his attack on Iran has greatly compounded the problem, and this spells very bad news for the Republican Party, as it prepares for November’s Midterm Elections. Truthout notes that ‘there are 135 seats in Congress at the moment — 104 in the House and 31 Senate seats — that are held by Republicans in districts where Trump’s approval rating is below 50 per cent.’

A shift of just two seats could cost that party its present control of the House, and the loss of four seats would produce the same result in the Senate. Though Trump and some of his key supporters are actively seeking ways to undermine the Midterms and skew the vote, the risk of Trump having to finish his term with the federal legislative bodies in Democratic hands is considerable.

Compounding Trump’s loss of popular support is the emergence of a highly disgruntled wing of some of his most high-profile former allies, including the infamous Tucker Carlson. These detractors, moreover, reflect a broad dissatisfaction in the ranks of Trump’s MAGA base.

This development constitutes a significant rift within the political right, whereby many of those who fell for Trump’s anti-globalist rhetoric are now thoroughly dismayed at the realities of his present pursuit of gangster imperialism on the world stage, his costly support for Israel and his botched assault on Iran. Those who hold dear the dream of an isolationist and deeply authoritarian US, complete with mass deportations and sealed borders, are increasingly alienated by Trump’s continued commitment to ‘globalist wars’.

The fracturing of Trump’s base, even as his general popularity plummets, is a disastrous political development for the whole America First project and one that is likely to intensify as the economic situation deteriorates further and the Trump administration finds itself increasingly discredited and crisis-ridden. His deeply reactionary regime remains highly dangerous, domestically and internationally, but there is no denying that it has been weakened badly in the recent period.

Given the accumulating contradictions and adverse developments that Trump is blundering through, it is all but inevitable that things are going to go from bad to worse for his administration. The attacks, threats, retreats and threadbare justifications that pass for a strategy when it comes to the assault on Iran are producing no end of surprising and often unforeseen developments. It’s clear, though, that Trump utterly miscalculated in launching the Iran adventure and that he is now embroiled in a military failure, an economic disaster and a political humiliation all at the same time.

Though the Iranian debacle has taken the misfortunes of the Trump administration to new lows, it certainly didn’t initiate the decline. A cornerstone of the America First turn was the adoption of aggressive protectionism and the levelling of tariffs. It becomes increasingly clear that this key strategic turn is failing on its own terms.

On 19 March, a scathing article appeared in Foreign Policy Magazine declaring that: ‘Nearly one year after he launched a barrage of steep tariffs on what he called “Liberation Day,” economists have crunched the numbers for 2025—and they are not looking good for the White House. By Trump’s own yardstick—his three goals of making foreigners pay for doing business with the United States, narrowing the U.S. trade deficit, and punishing China—tariffs have clearly failed.’ 

Now the impacts of the tariff fiasco and of the economically disruptive attack on Iran are combining with nothing less than catastrophic implications. According to Politico, the IMF has ‘warned that global growth could slow to as little as 2 percent this year without a speedy resolution to the six-week conflict in Iran, due to a combination of soaring energy and food prices and a big rise in market interest rates that could choke off capital flows to much of the world … The same factors could push global inflation above 6 percent next year, it cautioned.’

Self-destructive

Though the crisis-ridden nature of the Trump administration is hardly reducible to personal characteristics or psychological profiles, it is impossible to listen to the statements or read the social-media posts coming from Trump and his inner circle without a sense that they are perversely self-destructive in the face of the challenges they are up against.

When the Pope recently offered some criticisms of the attack on Iran, rather than crafting a measured response that might defuse the situation, Trump chose to launch a furious attack on the Pontiff, accusing him of ‘catering to the radical left’ and posting what the Guardian described as ‘a now-deleted AI meme depicting himself as a Jesus Christ-like healer, an act which drew outrage from supporters and opponents alike.’

The mounting note of crisis and instability that the Trump administration is beset by is a political factor of global importance. However, the broader implications that flow from this are even more devastating. 

Trump returned to power largely because the Biden interlude had failed to restore the post-war brand of US ‘world leadership’ over a ‘rules-based’ order. Now, Trump’s attempt to reverse the relative decline of the US by way of a pragmatic and reckless brand of gangster imperialism is in an even worse state of disarray.

Clearly, the US-led system under which global capitalism has functioned since World War II is no longer viable because that weakened world power is no longer able to act as its guarantor and enforcer. Within an incredibly short span of time, however, the brash and confident America First alternative is already failing badly and spectacularly. This crisis of US imperialism becomes a crisis of global capitalism.

In this situation, the political nerve centre in Washington is in the hands of an administration that is erratic, increasingly unstable and enormously dangerous. It is hard to imagine how things could become more volatile and uncertain, but we can be confident that Trump and his inner circle are working on it.