Vietnam ruined Lyndon B. Johnson’s political career. Will Donald Trump face the same fate over Iran?

Is United States President Donald Trump lurching toward decline and fall? Will he and his MAGA movement reprise Lyndon B. Johnson’s story, when the quagmire of the Vietnam War took the Democratic president out of the 1968 election and gave Republican Richard Nixon the opening he needed to defeat the Democrats? Trump’s war on Iran is already hurting him politically. More than half of Americans disapprove of the decision to join Israel and attack Iran. And Iran is not the only problem for Trump and MAGA. The loss of 92,000 jobs in February offers little good news. Neither does a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the tariff strategy at the core of Trump’s economic plan. There’s also the lingering risk posed by ongoing media and public attention to the Jeffrey Epstein files. Amid all these storm clouds, Trump’s extreme and bizarre behaviour shows no signs of abating. His provocative boorishness continues: as with the “Good, I’m glad he’s dead” posting about the death of former FBI director Robert Mueller and the baseball cap he wore at the “dignified transfer” of the remains of U.S. soldiers who have died in the conflict. Other disturbing and ultimately weightier behaviour has included Trump’s bulldozing of the American Constitution as readily as the East Wing of the White House by ignoring congressional powers, weaponizing the Department of Justice and fostering kleptocracy for friends and family via cryptocurrency ventures. Without discounting the toll of the extreme and bizarre, however, the potential impact of a traditional force hiding in plain sight may prove more powerful. Will Trump’s 2024 voters shift loyalties because the purportedly amazing “deal maker” has forgotten that buyers have cancellation options when they become unhappy?
Parallels to LBJ Former president Lyndon B. Johnson — known colloquially as LBJ — may offer the most dramatic cautionary tale for Trump. The shrewd Texan was a master of congressional coalitions crucial to achieving transformative “Great Society” milestones like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the “War on Poverty.” Becoming president after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson’s triumph in his own right in the 1964 election turned gradually toward disaster. The costs of a protracted conflict in Vietnam — that “bitch of a war,” in Johnson’s own words — was the primary driver in his reversal of electoral fortunes. But his problems were also compounded by backlash against radicalization within the Civil Rights Movement, the tradition-shaking tremors emanating from the 1960s “counterculture” and the so-called sexual revolution. Wilson and Truman There are other lessons for Trump in the experiences of Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman. Wilson predated LBJ in a dramatic loss of support among once-enthusiastic voters. At the end of the First World War, the 38th president and his Democrats faced disaster in 1919-20, when struggles at the Paris Peace Conference and the flaws of its Treaty of Versailles made it clear that a messianic crusade to “end all wars” and “make the world safe for democracy” had been vastly oversold. Wilson damaged his party further by refusing to compromise with congressional internationalists of both parties (partially attributable to the president’s October 1919 stroke). Republicans went on to win the 1920, 1924 and 1928 elections. Feisty Harry Truman came to the presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1945 death and made his “Fair Deal” extensions of FDR’s New Deal popular enough to win election himself in 1948. Serious problems then emerged when Soviet testing of an atomic bomb, and the emergence of the People’s Republic of China spurred Cold War anxieties. All of this was intensified by Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “pinko” domestic subversives and the mounting frustrations of a long-stalemated war in Korea. Republicans under Dwight Eisenhower easily won the 1952 election. Trump’s turn? There’s little evidence Trump cares much about or understands historical precedents, but if he does, he might be experiencing some alarm at the moment. The specifics of Trump’s transactional relationship with voters may not repeat past patterns exactly, but the underlying dynamics of political transactionalism are difficult to suppress. Buyers’ remorse, in fact, may dramatically reveal itself later this year in the mid-term elections. Promising “golden age” economic growth, Trump has instead delivered results that range from disappointing to devastating. Lurching tariff policies have caused tensions in profitable trade relationships, including Canada, and increases in prices. Any easing of inflation is now seriously threatened by a war-related oil crisis. Gas price increases already greater than 20 per cent signal a cascading impact on manufacturing and food production costs. Voters do not need Democrat messaging to feel affordability stress — they’re living it. ICE overkill Trump also set immigration correction as a primary goal, tapping into clear voter desire. But his administration has used excessive force and scale that have turned off many voters. ICE pullback in Minneapolis shows the limits of Donald Trump’s scare tactics

The year 2025 may have resulted in a 93 per cent drop in apprehensions of unauthorized entrants at U.S. borders, but it also brought ICE ferocity, slayings of American citizens and the fierceness of incarcerations in facilities like Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” without due process. There have also been disruptions of neighbourhoods and workplaces across the country as long-time “illegals” are rounded up or forced into hiding. Another vaunted Trump promise: an “America First” stance that avoided the global activism requiring costly military ventures. And yet, Trump has made threats against Greenland and Canada, embarked upon a military invasion of Venezuela and extracted President Victor Maduro, and launched military operations in Somalia, Yemen and Syria. The ongoing war in Iran has now been waged with ever-shifting justifications and without congressional authorization. Allies or enemies? Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland put NATO in a tough spot

Consequences Flawed delivery on key campaign commitments reveals core weaknesses in Trump’s “art of the deal” posturing — particularly his insensitivity to the two-way-street dynamic of a successful transactional relationship with voters. In a democratic system, even an imperfect one, voters show support for promises both made and kept. There can be patience about the pacing of the delivery of those promises, as Trump seemed to be granted about inflation in the early months of his second presidency. There can be pragmatism about the realities of overseas conflicts of the kind LBJ enjoyed in the Vietnam War’s initial stages. At some point, however, voters usually shift course because they see they’re not getting what they voted for. Will this fate befall Trump in November?

Ronald W. Pruessen has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.