Republican President George W. Bush’s stupid war in Iraq (launched on false premises and bogus promises) triggered a blue tsunami in the 2006 midterms and resulted in Democratic takeovers of the House and Senate.
Today, Republican President Donald Trump’s stupid war in Iran (launched with inept planning and bogus promises) could help trigger a blue tsunami in the 2026 midterms, resulting in Democratic takeovers of the House and Senate.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but on occasion it rhymes. This may be one of those times.
Granted, the parallels are imperfect. By 2006 Bush had been waging the Iraq war for nearly four years, and Democratic candidates in the midterm races (including a Senate hopeful named Barack Obama) kept the issue front and center. By contrast, Trump’s Iran war is only six months old, but a solid majority of grassroots voters in every poll recognize his war and his inflationary economy are intertwined. Support for the war has fallen to 31 percent, a six-point slide since March.
It’s a virtually foregone conclusion the Republican House will fall to the Democrats, and now there are serious indicators the Senate may go blue as well, with Democrats potentially flipping seats in red states like Alaska, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and perhaps even Texas. Many issues besides the war are in play – especially Trump’s tariffs, which are hurting rural midwesterners who normally vote MAGA – but the war is a perfect metaphor for everything the guy does and say wrong.
One of his slogans is “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” Remember those words as we monitor how the warlord has run his mouth.
March 2: “I always thought that (the Iran war) would be four weeks. And we’re a little ahead of schedule.”
March 9: “I think the war is very complete, pretty much.”
March 24: “This war has been won.”
April 6: “We are the winner. We won, OK?”
April 25: “We won everything, we have all the cards.”
June 12: “We ended the war with Iran today.”
June 24: “For the first time in 3000 years, we are finally going to have peace in the Middle East.”
July 8: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.”
Aug. 26, in an AI image: “Mission Accomplished 2026.”
As the writer Mary McCarthy famously said of her rival Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie including and and the.” That’s an apt summation of Trump at the six-month mark of his war. He has won no victory. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz; before his war began roughly 130 ships passed through it daily, but thanks to him the daily tally is around 12. He has seriously diminished our munitions stockpiles, to the point where we have less readiness to defend American interests elsewhere in the world. Oh, and the average domestic price of gas was $3 when his war began, but now it’s $4.10.
Lest we forget, Bush and his surrogates kept insisting they invaded Iraq because it supposedly posed “an imminent threat” to America. My favorite lie was when Bush said, in September 2002, that a “new” report by the International Atomic Energy Agency put Iraq “six months away” from building a nuke – whereupon the IAEA released this priceless statement: There’s never been a report like that issued from this agency.”
The “imminent” con may sound familiar, since it was resurrected and presented anew, just a few short months ago, by Trump’s flunkies. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt (now departed) said ballistic missiles from Iran could “pose a risk” to us “one day,” and that Trump had “a feeling” the threat was imminent. Lindsey Graham (now really departed) said that future Iranian missiles could reach us “eventually.” And Pentagon beefcake Pete Hegseth (un-departed) defined imminent in his own fashion, saying that Iran might “eventually get to a place” where they could build and protect nukes.
Richard Haas, who was director of policy planning at the State Department when Bush invaded Iraq (and who had reservations at the time), succinctly assessed Trump’s war the other day in remarks to The New York Times: “This has been a fiasco. That’s the harsh reality. He can declare ‘mission accomplished.’ He can try to sell the argument as he often tries to, almost to create reality. But it’s going to be a hard, hard sell.” Especially in a hostile election environment.
In the words of long-dead French literary critic Marcel Proust, war is “a pathological condition because it admits of accidents which not even a skilled physician could have foreseen.” What voters outside the MAGA cult know well by now is that the present war, at the six-month mark, is being waged by a fraud who markets lies for a living.
The day of reckoning is near. I think.
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]