Trump's War Is Backfiring-Fast
The Iran war, collapsing approval, and a widening fracture inside Trump's world
Trump’s War Is Backfiring-Fast
The Iran war, collapsing approval, and a widening fracture inside Trump's world
The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #888: Monday, May 4th, 2026.
There are moments in politics when everything feels loud…but nothing actually changes.
And then there are moments like this one.
Where the noise isn’t just noise anymore.
It’s pressure.
And pressure…real pressure….does something very specific. It exposes weakness. It forces decisions. It strips away the performance…and shows you what’s actually underneath.
Right now, three separate storylines are unfolding around Donald Trump. Individually, each one looks like another bad week. But together…they form a pattern that’s getting harder to ignore…and harder to spin away.
Let me show you what I mean.
1. The War Isn’t Strength. It’s Strain.
On Sunday, the President announced that the United States would launch an effort on Monday to “guide” stranded ships out of the Iran-gripped Strait of Hormuz…even as two cargo ships near the strait reported attacks that same day.
That’s not a deterrence policy. That’s an emergency operation.
The Strait of Hormuz handles about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas trade. Iran has effectively closed it since the war began on February 28.
The International Energy Agency has called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.
Read that line again.
The largest. In history.
And…here’s the part the administration cannot make disappear with a press release: by May 1, the average U.S. gallon of gas had hit $4.39…roughly fifty percent higher than at the eve of the war.
The World Bank now projects global energy prices will surge 24% this year…the biggest jump since Russia invaded Ukraine.
War only looks like strength until it starts costing people something.
It is now costing people something. Every fill-up. Every grocery run. Every paycheck that doesn’t stretch the way it did six months ago.
That isn’t dominance leaking into the economy. That’s strain leaking into the headlines.
2. The Public Is Turning-And It’s Not Slowing Down
Here is what the polling actually says, on May 4, 2026.
Pew Research puts Trump’s approval at 34%…the lowest mark of his second term. The Silver Bulletin polling average puts him at -18.4 net approval, with Reuters/Ipsos clocking him at -30 and The Economist/YouGov at -22. His approval on the cost of living sits at -41.5.
These are not normal numbers. These are erosion numbers.
And they’re getting worse where it should hurt the most… inside his own coalition.
Among 2024 Trump voters, approval has slid from 95% in his first weeks to 78% today. Among his Hispanic voters…the drop is 27 points since early 2025.
Among Republicans, confidence in Trump to use military force wisely has fallen 11 points in less than a year.
Approval ratings don’t collapse in a straight line.
They hold.
They hold.
They hold.
And then something shifts…not because of any one event…but…because the accumulation finally becomes undeniable.
That shift is happening now.
A Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll released yesterday found Americans broadly dissatisfied with Trump’s leadership on Iran…and Democrats significantly more motivated to vote six months from the midterms.
A majority of voters, 53%…now call the Iran action a failure.
That is not a dip.
That is structural.
3. The Cracks Are Spreading Beyond Politics
This is where the story stops looking like a normal news cycle.
A sitting U.S. president is, right now, in an open public feud with the Pope a conflict so unusual that Vatican observers say you have to reach back to the Middle Ages for a comparable episode.
Trump has called Pope Leo XIV “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy.” He has questioned the legitimacy of his election. He has demanded the Pope stop criticizing the war.
Pope Leo, the first American-born pontiff, has refused. He has said he has no fear of speaking out. He has said God does not bless this war.
And…the diplomatic mess is now severe enough…that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is flying to the Vatican and Italy this week to try to clean it up…at the same moment the Pentagon is announcing a 5,000-troop drawdown from Germany.
Pause and look at that picture.
A president picking public fights with global religious leadership.
In the middle of a war.
While approval ratings collapse.
While allies pull back.
That’s not random. That’s pressure leaking out sideways. That’s a leader who is reacting, not directing…and the difference between those two things is the entire ballgame.
4. The Environment Itself Has Changed
Zoom all the way out.
You have an active war. You have the largest oil-supply disruption ever recorded. You have inflation projections…being revised upward by central banks across the world.
You have a president with the lowest approval of his term. You have a public diplomatic rupture with the Vatican. You have…a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ dinner just days ago.
That is not one storyline.
That is an environment.
And environments matter more than headlines…because environments shape behavior. Allies become more cautious.
Opponents become more aggressive. Institutions begin adjusting behind the scenes. Narratives start to fracture. None of that is loud. All of it…is real.
So What Does This Actually Mean?
Here’s where most people get it wrong.
They think a moment like this means something is about to collapse tomorrow. It doesn’t. What you are looking at is early-stage destabilization…not the end…not the middle, the early stage.
And early stages have a very specific feel:
Things feel off. Narratives stop lining up cleanly. Reactions become more erratic. Control starts to look like overcompensation.
That is exactly where we are.
Why This Moment Matters More Than It Looks
Once pressure becomes visible, it doesn’t go away. It compounds.
Every new stress point doesn’t reset the system. It adds to it. And…right now the system is carrying a great deal of weight at once…war pressure…economic pressure… political pressure…narrative pressure…religious pressure.
That combination is rare. And when it shows up, it tends to lead somewhere.
This isn’t ultimately about whether Trump “survives” politically. That framing is too narrow.
This is about how systems behave under sustained stress.
Once a system begins showing strain publicly…it changes how everyone interacts with it. Allies recalculate. Opponents press harder. Institutions quietly adjust.
Markets price in instability. Voters who were tuning out start tuning in. None of those things reverse on their own.
Let Me Say This Clearly
You are not imagining the shift.
Something is changing. Not exploding. Not collapsing. But…shifting…and shifting in a particular direction.
You are going to start seeing more of the following:
Faster reactions out of the White House, more unpredictable messaging, more aggressive attempts to project strength…more friction at home and abroad. Not because things are under control.
Because they aren’t.
There is a difference…between chaos…and pressure. Chaos is loud but random. Pressure is quiet…and directional.
What we are watching has direction.
And…when pressure has direction…it leads somewhere.
Quick check before you go:
Does it feel to you like something has shifted in the last week or two? Drop a yes or no in the comments…I’m watching the patterns in how people are sensing this in real time…and your read…matters.
BONUS: The Five Tells of a System Under Real Pressure
Most people read the news one headline at a time. That’s why they keep getting surprised.
The trick is to stop reading headlines and start reading tells…the specific behaviors a system shows when it is genuinely under stress, regardless of what its press secretary says.
Here are the five to watch for.
When you see three or more in the same week, you are no longer in a normal news cycle. You are in something else.
1. Allies start hedging publicly…not privately.
Private hedging is normal. Public hedging is a tell. Watch for foreign leaders who used to praise on camera and now decline to comment.
Watch for senators who used to defend on Sunday shows and now happen to be busy. The Pentagon’s announced 5,000-troop drawdown from Germany is exactly this kind of signal…quiet…structural…dressed up as routine.
2. The messaging speed increases…but the message itself gets thinner.
Confidence is slow. Panic is fast. When a White House goes from one major statement a day to four…and each one is shorter and more declarative than the last…that is not strength…that is a system trying to outrun its own coverage.
3. Loyalists start defending the frame, not the facts.
Watch for the shift from “here is what happened” to “here is why it doesn’t matter.” When surrogates stop arguing the substance and start arguing the media…the polling… the bias…the framing…they have already conceded the substance. They just don’t know it yet.
4. The president’s targets get bigger and more abstract.
Healthy political operations punch at specific opponents with specific grievances. Strained ones start swinging at categories…“the media,” “the globalists,” “the Pope,” “the courts.”
The bigger and more abstract the target…the more the fight is about emotional release…not strategic advantage.
5. Markets stop reacting to news and start reacting to mood.
This is the most reliable tell of all. When oil futures or the dollar move on a tweet rather than a policy…traders are no longer pricing in events…they are pricing in the person.
That’s a market that has stopped trusting the signal-to-noise ratio of the building. Once that trust goes…it does not come back quickly.
Print this list. Tape it somewhere. Over the next thirty days, just put a tick next to each one as you see it.
You are not going to need a pundit…to tell you what’s happening.
You are going to see it yourself.
#Holdfast
Back soon.
-Jack
Jack Hopkins
P.S. A note on what to actually do with this. The mistake right now is to either tune it all out or to doom-scroll yourself into paralysis. Neither helps. The job…for anyone paying attention…is to track the pattern…not the noise.
Three things to watch this week: gas prices (the EIA’s next Short-Term Energy Outlook drops May 12, whether the Strait of Hormuz convoy operation actually moves ships…or….escalates incidents…and whether Rubio’s Vatican trip de-escalates or deepens the rift.
Those three indicators will tell you…more than any cable segment….whether the pressure is starting to release…or starting to break something.
I’ll be writing on each of them as they move. If you found this useful…the most helpful thing you can do is forward it to one person who’s been feeling the shift…but hasn’t been able to name it. Naming it is half of how anxiety becomes agency.
Sources
[1] Trump says the U.S. will ‘guide’ stranded ships from the Strait of Hormuz — NPR
[2] 2026 Iran war fuel crisis — Wikipedia
[3] Gas Prices Hit Highest Mark Since the Start of the Iran War — U.S. News & World Report
[4] Middle East War to Spark Biggest Energy Price Surge in Four Years — World Bank Group
[5] Trump Loses Ground on Several Personal Traits as Approval Rating Slips — Pew Research Center
[6] Trump Approval Rating: Latest Polls — Silver Bulletin (Nate Silver)
[7] Trump disapproval reaches new high, Post-ABC-Ipsos poll finds — The Washington Post
[9] 2026 United States–Holy See rift — Wikipedia
[10] Pope Leo Responds to Attack by Trump, Saying He Has ‘No Fear’ of Speaking Out — TIME
[11] Rubio to visit Italy, Vatican amid troop drawdown call, tension with Trump, Pope Leo — Fox News
[12] Short-Term Energy Outlook — U.S. Energy Information Administration
This gives me a lot of hope, but I can't help but zoom out to the really big picture. Whether on purpose or most likely coincidence, Putin seems to be benefiting from this war. The lifting of Russian Oil Sanctions. The fact that the US seems to be pulling further and further away from NATO, which would reduce Europe's ability to fight Putin. Why is Putin helping Iran with Intelligence and and why does Trump just seems to accept it. Is the war with Iran just a show to allow Russia to gain financial and military strength. Far out thinking, but I am struggling to make sense of all of the big picture moving parts.
Yes! You always remind me to #HOLDFAST!!