The strange timing of disapproval
Why did Donald Trump’s criminal conviction and the civil finding that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll fail to dislodge so much of his political support, while tariffs, rising living costs, and the war with Iran have apparently helped erode it? The question is not why every American changed their mind; many never supported Trump, and his supporters have never shared a single motive. It is why certain forms of misconduct could be discounted as politically tolerable while disappointments in economic and foreign policy appear to have disturbed the bargain.
Recent polling makes the contrast worth examining. A September Reuters/Ipsos survey placed Trump’s approval at 32 percent and found weakening Republican confidence in his handling of living costs. Reuters has also reported widespread dissatisfaction with the Iran war and the household costs associated with his foreign-policy agenda. Polls cannot disclose the moral reasoning of each respondent, nor can they establish that tariffs or war alone caused the decline. But they illuminate a puzzle: when a leader’s usefulness becomes uncertain, qualities previously treated as secondary may suddenly seem less easy to overlook.
The temptation is to call this hypocrisy and stop there. Yet that answer is too shallow. The deeper possibility is that many citizens have learned to judge political leadership through a form of reason that asks first whether a leader can deliver, and only afterward whether the person and the purposes deserve their allegiance. That way of reasoning is not irrational. It is rationality narrowed to the calculation of means and anticipated results.
When character becomes a cost
Political life necessarily involves compromise. Citizens routinely choose between imperfect candidates, weigh competing obligations, and assess policies by their consequences. No responsible account of democracy can dispense with such judgments. The problem begins when the anticipated effectiveness of a leader becomes a standing excuse for setting aside truthfulness, restraint, fidelity, and responsibility—as though these were optional ornaments rather than qualities that shape the exercise of power.
The implicit bargain is familiar: he may be dishonest or reckless, but he will secure the border, strengthen the economy, restrain our adversaries, or protect our interests. Character is entered on the debit side of a political ledger, to be tolerated if the returns appear sufficient. When the returns diminish, approval falls. Yet dissatisfaction with the bargain does not necessarily amount to rejection of the logic behind it. The voter may simply be recalculating.
This is the first unsettling possibility the article must entertain: the decline of a leader’s popularity can coexist with the persistence of the very habits of judgment that sustained him. We may have changed our estimate of what works without reconsidering what is worth working for.
Technological rationality is not technology
By technological rationality I do not mean the use of computers, machinery, or scientific knowledge. Nor do I mean that efficiency and effectiveness are unworthy goals. I mean a form of practical reasoning that, when elevated beyond its proper place, treats the world as a set of problems to be managed through the selection of effective means. Its characteristic question is how to secure a result. Its weakness appears when the result itself, and the relationships altered in its pursuit, escape moral examination.
Max Weber’s distinction between means–ends rational action and action oriented toward values helps name the problem. Jacques Ellul’s account of technique presses further, examining how the demand for efficient methods can become an organizing social imperative. Charles Taylor’s critique of instrumental reason asks what happens when the moral horizons that make our purposes intelligible recede behind calculations of utility. These thinkers differ substantially, but together they help distinguish reason’s indispensable instrumental work from its illegitimate claim to govern the whole of human life.
The distinction between efficiency and effectiveness is important but insufficient. Efficiency asks how economically an objective can be pursued; effectiveness asks whether it is achieved. Neither question, by itself, can determine whether the objective is worthy, whom it excludes, or what becomes of us in pursuing it. Those are questions of judgment.
The persons our practices make
Here the tradition associated with Johann Gottfried Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt introduces a necessary correction. Human beings are not isolated calculators whose purposes arrive fully formed before they encounter others. We understand ourselves through language, history, culture, and relationships. Our powers develop through participation in a world we did not create alone. Humboldt’s concern with Bildung—the cultivation of human capacities—makes freedom more than the mere ability to select among available options.
This is not a simple opposition between Romanticism and Enlightenment reason. Herder and Humboldt themselves inherit and transform Enlightenment aspirations, and rationalism or empiricism should not be equated wholesale with technocracy. Their importance here is more specific: they remind us that the way we pursue our purposes also forms the people who pursue them. Practices do not merely produce outcomes. They cultivate dispositions, expectations, and capacities.
That insight changes how we understand political compromise. Repeatedly overlooking failures of character for promised results may do more than elect particular leaders. It may gradually normalize a standard of leadership under which character matters only when usefulness fails. The criteria by which citizens evaluate political life begin, in turn, to shape the citizens doing the evaluating.
The Abraham Accords: an agreement is not yet peace
The Abraham Accords offer an instructive international example. The 2020 normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain created real diplomatic relationships and opportunities for trade, travel, and cooperation. Those achievements should not be dismissed. Nor should the agreements be condemned simply for failing to settle the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, which was not their direct negotiating purpose.
Nevertheless, their presentation as an architecture of regional peace invites a deeper question. The agreements advanced relations among states while leaving Palestinian political aspirations and the historical conditions of that conflict substantially unresolved. The International Institute for Strategic Studies noted at the time that the accords served the immediate interests of participating governments but were unlikely to advance a viable Israeli–Palestinian settlement. Their success as normalization agreements therefore cannot, without further argument, be taken as success at the deeper work of peacebuilding.
In my earlier essay, ‘The Failure of Technocratic Rationality in Peacebuilding,’ I explored the tendency of professionalized peace initiatives to privilege agreements, institutional designs, and measurable achievements over listening, trust, historical memory, and local agency. Drawing on peacebuilding scholarship, I argued that peace cannot be manufactured by arrangements among elites alone. Reconciliation requires the slower and less easily quantified work of encountering other people as more than obstacles or instruments.
The distinction is not between diplomacy and human relationships, as though one could replace the other. It is between diplomacy understood as one necessary practice of peace and diplomacy mistaken for the entirety of peace. A settlement can work on its own terms while leaving the meaning of its success morally incomplete. Effective for what—and for whom?
Iran and the limits of strategic mastery
The 2026 war with Iran places the limitations of transactional statecraft in sharper relief. United States and Israeli strikes beginning on February 28 were followed by Iranian retaliation across the region, attacks on shipping and infrastructure, and a prolonged conflict whose costs have reached far beyond the original combatants. Congressional Research Service reporting describes a sequence of ceasefire and negotiation efforts followed by renewed fighting and mounting risks for all parties.
It is tempting to say that Trump was led into war by the strategic ambitions of others. Israeli preferences and regional pressures certainly belong in any serious account of the decision. But the claim that he was simply maneuvered into conflict would require evidence about deliberations and causal influence that rhetoric alone cannot supply. The American president retained agency and responsibility. The more defensible question is whether a style of politics built around bargaining, coercive leverage, and promises of decisive results proved inadequate to the relationships and contingencies that war unleashed.
Here again, the issue is not that strategic calculation is unnecessary. Governments must assess threats, capabilities, and likely consequences. The question is whether the calculation of advantage can substitute for judgment about proportionality, responsibility, foreseeable human suffering, and the political world that military action leaves behind. A war can be planned as an instrument; it cannot be made to remain merely an instrument.
The Gulf allies and the cost of security
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates make this question concrete. These states have cultivated different forms of security cooperation with Washington while also pursuing their own regional interests. In 2026, Iranian attacks struck Gulf states, including civilian and critical infrastructure. Bahrain, host to the United States Fifth Fleet, experienced attacks on facilities and broader economic disruption; the UAE and Saudi Arabia also faced substantial threats. These are not interchangeable cases, and Gulf governments have differed in their responses to the war.
To describe this simply as American abandonment would obscure both continuing United States defensive assistance and the agency of Gulf governments. Yet the predicament remains revealing. Security arrangements intended to reduce vulnerability can also make partners exposed to retaliation, especially when they are drawn into the consequences of decisions they did not fully control. The fact that defensive systems intercepted many attacks does not erase the damage or the uncertainty imposed on civilian life.
An alliance cannot be understood solely as an exchange of access, weapons, guarantees, and strategic benefit. It also carries expectations of consultation, trust, restraint, and responsibility for foreseeable consequences. When the language of security becomes detached from these relationships, what appears to be a successful arrangement may disclose a deeper fragility precisely when it is tested.
When the instrument becomes the architect
The deepest danger of technological rationality, then, is not that its calculations sometimes fail. Every form of reasoning can err. The greater danger emerges when a way of thinking originally employed to achieve our purposes begins to shape the purposes themselves… and the people who pursue them. We imagine ourselves standing outside our instruments, selecting them according to ends independently chosen. But our practices also educate our desires and organize our expectations.
Citizens who repeatedly treat truthfulness as expendable do not simply register a preference. They help establish a political environment in which truthfulness commands less authority. Leaders learn what will be rewarded; institutions adapt to those rewards; public argument begins to take the new standards for granted. The effect need not be universal or irreversible to be serious. The exercise of political choice can gradually diminish the cultural resources upon which responsible choice depends.
This is the hinge in the argument. The problem is no longer merely whether a tariff succeeds, a military campaign meets its objectives, or a diplomatic accord produces measurable benefits. It is whether the prevailing standards of success are themselves shaping citizens who become less practiced at asking what should count as success. The instrument becomes an architect of the agent.
Arendt and the recovery of the question
Hannah Arendt’s reflections on thinking and political judgment sharpen this diagnosis. Judgment cannot be reduced to technical expertise or to the application of a preselected measure of success. It requires attention to particulars, the ability to consider perspectives other than one’s own, and an orientation toward a world shared with others. Her account of enlarged mentality is not a recipe for moral certainty; it is a challenge to the assumption that one’s immediate interests exhaust the political meaning of an action.
Arendt’s analysis should not be used to equate contemporary electoral politics with the totalitarian regimes she studied. Her historical distinctions matter. But her concern with thoughtlessness, i.e., the failure to examine what one is doing within prevailing conventions, illuminates the possibility that energetic political participation can coexist with impoverished judgment.
Perhaps, then, the most troubling question raised by declining approval of Trump is not why voters have finally begun to reconsider a political bargain. It is whether disappointment has prompted a reconsideration of the standard by which the bargain was made. If citizens withdraw support only when the promised returns diminish, the deeper rationality may remain untouched.
The question with which we began was why failures of policy seem to have cost Trump support that failures of character did not. The question with which we must end is more demanding: What happens when a people become so accustomed to judging what works that they begin to lose the capacity to judge what is worth working for?
Sources and further reading
Reuters/Ipsos, September 17–20, 2026 polling, reported by Ipsos: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/latest-us-opinion-polls
Reuters, “Trump foreign policy hits voters in the pocketbook,” October 24, 2026: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-foreign-policy-hits-voters-pocketbook-imperiling-republicans-midterms-2026-10-24/
IISS, “The Abraham Accords: Israel–Gulf Arab normalisation,” November 2020: https://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-comments/2020/abraham-accords/
Middle East Institute, “Abraham Accords: Backgrounder,” November 2025: https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/2025-11/Abraham%20Accords_Backgrounder_2025_0.pdf
Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Conflict with Iran,” September 2026: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R48887.html
Congressional Research Service, “The Arab Gulf States, the Iran Conflict, and U.S. Relations,” June 2026: https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R48971.html
Raymond Klassen, “The Corporate Agenda Part 3: The Failure of Technocratic Rationality in Peacebuilding,” 2021: https://idealsandidentities.com/2021/06/22/1975/
Max Weber, Economy and Society; Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society; Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity; Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy; Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action.
