Afrasianet - Hassan Gilad - On August 23,1864, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln sat in the White House and wrote what looked like an early acknowledgment of defeat. The Civil War was entering its fourth year, the Siege of Petersburg was prolonging, and General William Sherman's army was slowly advancing toward Atlanta, as news of the dead piled up and American patience waned.
"It seems very likely that this administration will not be re-elected," Lincoln wrote, then folded and glued the paper so that it could not be read, and asked members of his cabinet to sign on its back. They all signed a text they did not know its contents.
About ten days later, Atlanta fell.
Federal General Sherman's victory changed the course of the war, and with it the mood of the country. It suddenly seemed that the war that had exhausted Americans could end, and that the blood that had been spilled for four years was leading to a result. In November, the man who had expected to be defeated returned to the White House victorious over his Democratic rival, former General George McClellan.
This story encapsulates an age-old relationship between war and politics, where cannons fire in two directions. A shell that lands in enemy territory also reverberates at home, and can travel thousands of miles before settling at the ballot box. It happened with Lincoln when the news of Atlanta reached the American voter with the promise of victory, and in modern warfare it happens in a more complicated way; it can reach the citizen in the price of fuel, food, interest, and his ability to pay his rent at the end of the month.
In the midst of all the hustle and bustle surrounding his personality, Trump has a rare political sense of profound transformations in American society, he realized before the traditional Republican establishment that America is tired of its imperial role, and that a voter in Michigan or Ohio no longer understands why his country is paying the price for Europe's security, fighting for twenty years in Afghanistan, spending trillions of dollars in Iraq, while shutting down The factory near his house has its doors.
"Trump could present a different military statement: facilities destroyed, Iranian capabilities hit, and threats neutralized. But wars have another ledger that the generals don't write, and it now appears at home"
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The language of profit
Trump has formulated this fatigue in the language of the merchant, as the world has a ledger: Who paid? And who benefited? How much will this war cost us? What do the Allies give us in exchange for what we give them? And why does the American soldier protect the borders of others?
"America First" was the political version of that notebook.
This is why Trump's arrival in the White House carried a great paradox from the beginning. He was not an isolationist in the strict historical sense, but he built an important part of his legitimacy on rejecting the open wars fought by the American establishment, and he promised to get his country out of the bad deals in which blood and money were paid and did not receive, according to his logic, a return that justified the cost.
Then came Iran, and the president, who had despised the wars of his predecessors, found himself in the midst of a new Middle East war that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had long pushed in its direction, perhaps rightly called the Iran war, "Bibi's War."
In a Pew poll in March, 59 percent of Americans said the use of force against Iran was a wrong decision, and 61 percent disapproved of Trump's handling of the conflict. Nearly six weeks later, 59 percent of those who disapprove of the Trump administration's decision to go to war remain at 59 percent, and those who disapprove of the Trump administration have risen to 62 percent.
But polls alone don't explain how a distant war turns into an internal issue. That explanation is in a simpler place, it's the gas station.
The Bill and the National Sacrifice
The conflict and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz effectively choked a corridor through which about one-fifth of the world's oil passed, and the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States reached $4.08, up nearly 29% year-on-year. On August 14, Trump found himself asking Americans to accept rising fuel prices as a national sacrifice.
It's hard to imagine a more paradoxical picture of a president who has made his political language than asking about the bill.
The problem for Trump is that the war does not reach the American voter in the form of an Iranian missile; it reaches him with a bright number above the gas station. It reaches him when he buys food, when he calculates his house installments, and when he discovers that his income is no longer buying what he used to buy a year ago.
The consumer confidence index in August fell sharply, with increasing pressure from fuel and food prices exacerbated by the war, and the decline extended to the Republicans themselves.
Here, Atlanta in 1864 becomes more than a pretty anecdote at the beginning of an article. Victory has reached the elector of Lincoln as a promise of the near-end of a costly war, while Hormuz has reached the voter of Trump as a bill for a war that he does not know when it will end.
In New York, Democrat Zahran Mamdani ascended, and in Michigan, Abdulrahman "Abdul" al-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for the Senate.
It would be easy and wrong to see their victory as a referendum on Israel or Palestine, as their campaigns have been largely centered on the issues of affordability, housing, health, and the middle class, issues that become more weighty as Americans feel that foreign policy is taking money out of their pockets.
But in Mr. El-Sayed's experience in particular, another sign is hard to ignore: AIPAC and its affiliates entered the Michigan election with unprecedented financial strength, spending nearly $60 million to support his challenger, Haley Stevens, its largest investment in a single race, while outside spending in support of Stevens exceeded $50 million before the vote. Still, Mr. won by a narrow margin after a race that remained hanging for hours.
This result does not tell us that Michigan voters voted against Israel, nor should the ballot box be loaded with an unmade confession, but it does tell us something more precise: that a position critical of Israel is no longer necessarily a political death sentence, and the enormous financial machine capable of making it costly no longer guarantees the outcome you want.
"Trump did not treat Mr. Sayed's victory as a defeat. On the contrary, he saw an opportunity for Republicans, and invested the image of the progressive Muslim candidate in his political battle, using his full name, rhetoric and positions to present him as a model of the America he tells his supporters their opponents want"
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The taboo is cracking
The taboo began to crack at the money before we could say that it had broken in the ballot box. This is a deeper issue than winning or losing a candidate. Israel's strength in its relationship with the United States has long been based on two overlapping pillars: military superiority that protects its position in the Middle East and political immunity that protects its image at home. The former is measured by aircraft, missiles, and defense systems.
The second lives in the political imagination, in Congress, the media, universities, donors, and the ballot box. When this imagination begins to change, it becomes harder to recover than to replace a crashed plane or a missile that has run out of stockpiles.
Trump himself did not treat Mr. Sayed's victory as a defeat. On the contrary, he saw him as an opportunity for Republicans, and he capitalized on the image of the progressive Muslim candidate in his political battle, using his full name, rhetoric, and positions to present him as a model of the America that he tells his supporters their opponents want. In the days that followed, he escalated his attack, while Mr. Sayed responded that they indeed represented two different visions of America.
But the issue goes beyond the two men: Trump is adept at making his opponent an election scarecrow, and he may succeed again. The master himself won by a narrow margin, and he still faces a tougher test in the general election.
The most important significance lies in the environment in which such a candidate has become possible, and in America, where it is now debating things that would have been more expensive to debate a decade or two ago.
Here, war meets the economy, Israel intersects with domestic politics, as Netanyahu views Iran from within Israel's long history of struggle for security and regional supremacy, while Trump is supposed to view it through the eyes of the man who convinced Americans that he would not pay the bills of others.
The war may have achieved significant military goals, but the success of the war on the ground does not guarantee its success in the political imagination, as sometimes the price of victory begins the moment victory is declared itself.
"The problem for Trump is that the war does not reach the American voter in the form of an Iranian missile, but rather a bright number above the gas station"
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Trump and the anger of Americans
Trump understood before many Americans anger at globalization, their skepticism of institutions, their fatigue with wars, and the middle class's fear of the future. He understood that America, which had won the Cold War, was no longer sure it wanted to continue to run the world, and he built a political movement from that understanding that brought him back to the White House.
He then fought a war that returned the world's bill to the American.
In 1864, Atlanta reached the ballot box and saved Lincoln. In 2026, the Strait of Hormuz arrives in the U.S. on the gas station screen, while in New York and Michigan, a new policy is in motion whose boundaries are not yet clear, but which are able to challenge huge amounts of money and old taboos.
Trump may also win over it, as he has proven more than once that those who announce the end of the Trump phenomenon are in a hurry to write political obituaries.
In a speech in which he asked Americans to accept the price of gasoline, Trump said that he would soon declare the Strait of Hormuz as American territory, the man who asked, "Why does the American soldier protect the borders of others?" , ended up adding a waterway in the Persian Gulf to his country's map.
But a man who has lived long enough to smell the direction of the market before others knows the old rule of traders: the market doesn't care what you knew about it yesterday.
In Iran's war, his intuition seems to have betrayed him.
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