Now would normally be the moment for a term-limited president to tout his party's record as voters head to the polls in November — if there were achievements to cite, Reuters reports.

That is the unenviable situation facing President Donald Trump, who is preparing to face the public's judgment on a party that allowed him to push through one policy after another with little to no pushback.

As it stands, the war with Iran drags on and U.S. voters keep feeling the impact. Peace efforts in Gaza and Ukraine remain stuck. And because Republicans hold a government trifecta spanning the White House and both chambers of Congress, voters are inclined to blame the party for fuel and grocery prices, according to its weakened approval ratings.

Trump's heavy reliance on coercive pressure to push his way through the war gives Iran's leaders "little incentive to back down and reopen the Strait of Hormuz despite the country's weakening economy," analysts told Reuters. The strait — the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which roughly a fifth of the world's oil trade normally passes — is central to the economic pain voters are feeling, tying a distant conflict directly to prices at home.

"He is obsessed with applying coercion, and sometimes flattery, to bend others to his will, but oblivious to their strategic goals and domestic politics. As a result, he keeps flailing and failing," said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The war with Iran — along with Trump's months-long tariff policies — is affecting prices in the United States, and the Republican Congress that approved the undeclared war must now answer for that failure.

"The political clock is ticking," Reuters reports, "with Trump's Republican Party facing elections that could cost it control of one or both chambers of Congress and sharply curtail his ability to advance his agenda during his final two years in office." History offers little comfort for the party in power: since World War II, the president's party has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election, with 1998 and 2002 the main exceptions.

Adversaries on the international front, meanwhile, are aware that the octogenarian president is already in political trouble with his own voters, particularly when it comes to appearing weak.

"U.S. adversaries understand that his political clock is shorter than theirs, and that while the United States can apply enormous coercive pressure, it may eventually lose patience," said Asli Aydintasbas, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. "Putin, Xi and Iran may therefore want to wait out Washington. After November, the incentive to wait out Trump will become even more pronounced."

Voters, however, are unlikely to wait until after November to exact their price, with the economy pressing down on ordinary Americans, businesses and farmers. Beyond passage of the controversial One Big Beautiful Bill — the sweeping tax-and-spending package signed into law in July 2025, with its cuts to government safety-net programs — Trump has little in the way of policy on which to build a case, the report notes.