Trump, before and after the match

Trump attended the heaviest final in history, not so much to act as host as to make some memes with his friend Infantino. He went with two hot potatoes in his pockets: his war in Iran (which he's losing) and the midterm elections next November (which he might also lose). Both potatoes, of course, are strongly connected: naturally, the disastrous management of the Gulf crisis and its consequences worsen Trump's expectations before the elections, in which the majority in Congress is at stake.In Iran, Trump continues to cling to what the journalist from the New Yorker Robin Wright has defined as "ad-lib strategy", i.e., a strategy that is no strategy at all. A course of action based on sudden turns, caprice, volatility, and changes of direction, in which massive bombings are ordered one moment and supposed diplomatic successes are announced the next, which are always successes in the style of Vance, Hegseth, or Rubio: ideas that must have seemed good in the meetings of the hard core of the Trump administration but which fail on contact with reality. Having resumed the armed conflict after signing, even if only by teleconference, a peace agreement – now frozen from Tehran, while Trump went off to football – can only be described as a demonstration of ineptitude and weakness. It is clear that Trump and his collaborators underestimated the resistance capacity of the Ayatollah regime, which has even overcome the beheading of its leadership and renewed it without too many problems, at least in appearance. It has not been a walk in the park like staging a coup in Caracas, kidnapping Maduro, installing a puppet government in the country, and stealing its oil. Trump's pirate ship has run aground in the Gulf, and besides the thousands of human lives already consumed by the conflict, the orange pachyderm risks the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed. The consequent rise in fuel prices, and prices in general, is an extremely unpopular effect among the American electorate. This is one of the factors that explain the very low popularity ratings that Trump has been dragging for some time, and the poor expectations that polls give him for the "mid-termelections of November.This is why Trump has for days been resorting to the fascist resistance manual (they have one too) and appeared last Friday on Fox – no other channel wanted to broadcast it – with a statement warning of a possible electoral fraud like the one, according to him, that already occurred in the 2020 elections, a lie based on misrepresentations about immigration, demographics, and the census. Does that sound familiar? It's the same song that the far-right here repeats day and night, both the Spanish and the Catalan, starting with the pathetic Feijóo. It wasn't what Trump wanted, but remembering the American elections of 2020 was a way to also remind us that he was the instigator of the assault on the Capitol on Three Kings' Day in 2021. And that, consequently, he should not be in the presidency, but in prison.