Republicans lost the congressional elections because of the war with Iran, high fuel prices and miscalculations by President Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal wrote on Wednesday. With the start of the war, Trump’s political era came to an end, the newspaper said.
The Republican defeat is one of the clearest signals of opposition to a sitting president in recent U.S. history, the newspaper assessed.
The losses were likely a direct result of Trump’s decision to start the war with Iran, which led to a 40% rise in fuel prices. Many of his most loyal supporters felt disappointed, and Trump’s political era thus came to an end, the paper wrote.
When advisers told Trump in the spring that the war with Iran could hurt Republicans in the congressional elections, Trump replied that there was still plenty of time to find a solution, the newspaper reported, citing sources.
However, the paper stressed that the war was not the only factor that contributed to the Republicans’ severe defeat. As the newspaper noted, the tougher actions of immigration enforcement agencies, on the one hand, brought illegal border crossings down to their lowest level in decades, and on the other, sparked conflicts in American cities in which two Americans were shot dead. The paper pointed out that in counties where Hispanics make up at least 80% of residents, Democrats won the congressional vote by a margin of 40 percentage points.
According to the newspaper, Trump shifted his position on immigration throughout the year. At times he told his advisers he wanted to tighten enforcement even further. But after first lady Melania Trump complained about the deportations of people she knows, the president began telling associates that Stephen Miller, the architect of his hard-line immigration policy, had gone too far.
A senior administration official said the president sometimes told his advisers that he did not care at all about the outcome of the special congressional elections. According to that official, Trump was tired of worrying about domestic politics, which in his view did not matter as much as foreign policy and his own legacy.
When advisers told him that polls showed voters were concerned about how he was handling the problem of rising living costs, Trump claimed the surveys were fake.
Trump also pushed Republicans who would have had a better chance of winning to drop out of the race for Senate seats. This applied to candidates in Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Texas. In their place, he handpicked candidates he considered more loyal to himself. Democrats won in all four of those states.
Trump’s advisers downplay his role in the defeat, stressing that the president took part in 30 campaign rallies. They also argue that other candidates whom Trump did not endorse would have lost as well, the newspaper wrote.
According to the newspaper, Trump was shocked to learn that the U.S. armed forces were facing ammunition shortages amid the war with Iran. He was so intent on lowering fuel prices that he struck a deal with Russia on diesel fuel supplies.
Allegations of corruption in the Trump administration and within the president’s own family also worried voters, the WSJ stressed. Even so, Trump continued to focus on his favorite projects, including the construction of a ballroom at the White House and a plan to build a triumphal arch.
Advisers said there was no point in urging Trump to stop talking about the ballroom. The president held several long meetings a week devoted to the project and enjoyed giving guests tours of the structure as it went up.
From Washington, Natalia Dziurdzińska (PAP)
