Rick Rosner On, 5: Trump, Iran, Afghanistan, and Durable Approval
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/06/19
Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Rick Rosner from Ukraine and Los Angeles about U.S. politics, polling, and global power. Rosner compares Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal with Trump’s handling of the war with Iran, arguing Trump’s approval remains unusually durable despite blunders. He attributes this resilience to partisan media, statistical polling jitter, and an unwavering base, warning that American decline could accelerate as AI and geopolitical competition reshape national dominance in a rapidly changing world.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: It is June 19. I am still in Ukraine, continuing the reportage. Rick, you are still in Los Angeles. Thank you for letting me call you from halfway across the world. Do you want to talk about politics, math, or something else today?
Rick Rosner: Sure, politics for a second.
Jacobsen: What is the first thing off the top of your mind?
Rosner: I have a worry. There are parallels between Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan, which damaged his approval with the American people for much of the rest of his presidency, and Trump’s handling of the war with Iran. Biden had been doing pretty well; then he withdrew from Afghanistan, and his approval dropped and never fully recovered. Trump’s situation is probably more connected to hubris, but both are built from bad assumptions. Both involve a significant, though comparatively small, death toll for American troops.
What worries me is that Trump’s blunder will not make him pay a political price. It will not affect his approval the way Biden’s approval was damaged by his actions. I track Trump’s approval day by day, and it is too early to say, but in the past week his approval has ticked upward by about half a percent.
Jacobsen: Why?
Rosner: Largely because day-to-day and week-to-week approval depends on which polls have come out. Some polls are right-leaning, and he does better in those polls. Right now, probably about half of the polls in his aggregate on Silver Bulletin, Nate Silver’s polling site, are right-leaning polls where he comes in at 40% approval or better. Four out of the ten most recent polls are right-leaning polls.
So, it is too early to tell. That is statistical jitter. It does not necessarily mean anything. But there is no sign of any precipitous drop, which, if there were any equivalence, there should be. But there is no equivalence. Biden’s approval was fickle, and Trump’s approval is durable.
For almost all of the past ten years, Trump has been underwater in approval, and that remains true. But the approval he does have, his base, is fairly unwavering. It is hard for him to do anything that hurts him with his people. To some extent, that is because they do not hear about it. If they watch Fox News, they hear a sanitized version of what he has done and its consequences. A lot of them simply do not know.
Why should I care? Because he continues to act with impunity, and a lot of what he does continues to hurt our country. This is always a critical time for the country, but now seems especially critical because we are competing with other large global powers for continued global dominance during a time when AI and other technologies are shaking everything up. If we fall behind now, it may be impossible to recover, and we will become a permanent also-ran country.
Things move faster now. In the past, maybe the country could survive one bad presidential administration and still remain the dominant power. Now things move too fast for that, and Trump is too crappy for that.
Jacobsen: Thank you very much for the opportunity and your time, Rick.
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