Opinion | Tariffs, Truth Social And Total War: The Three T’s Of A Trumpian World

15 months into his second term, Trump is fighting a war in Iran, a global trade battle, & his poll numbers. He promised to win everything at once, but is now losing on every front.

There is a particular kind of political vertigo that sets in when a leader confuses audacity with strategy. Donald Trump entered his second term in January 2025 with a governing theory built on maximum pressure applied everywhere at once: tariffs to rebuild American industry, executive muscle to bend institutions into shape, and military force to reorder the Middle East. The theory was that momentum itself would be enough, that adversaries, trading partners, and domestic critics would simply fold under the weight of a relentless offensive.

The opening months projected command. World leaders arrived at the White House in a procession that Trump stage-managed for maximum effect, tariff threats were issued as diplomatic ultimatums, and the Oval Office became a backdrop for a presidency that confused the appearance of leverage with leverage itself. It looked, briefly, like a demonstration of strength. It was, in retrospect, a demonstration of appetite.

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Fourteen months later, that theory is in serious trouble. Trump is entering mid-April 2026 with an approval rating hovering near the lowest sustained levels of his second term. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS put his overall approval at 35 per cent, a point off his all-time low.

The decline has been coming for some time and is a visual symptom of the diseases that have plagued Donald Trump’s presidency. It maps precisely onto the three defining crises of Trump’s second chapter: the tariff war, the Iran conflict, and the social media meltdowns that have turned his Truth Social platform into a real-time chronicle of a presidency under strain.

Tariffs: A Victory Claimed, Then Overturned

The trade offensive began with genuine ambition. Trump arrived in the Oval Office convinced that America had been systematically exploited by its trading partners for decades, and that blunt tariffs were the corrective tool which previous administrations had lacked the balls to apply. From January to April 2025, the overall average effective US tariff rate rose from 2.5 per cent to an estimated 27 per cent, which was the highest in over a century.

The centrepiece of the magnanimous thinking was something which the White House branded “Liberation Day" tariffs, sweeping levies applied on all goods from nearly all countries under emergency powers of........

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