PHILADELPHIA – It seemed to me that I had travelled backwards in time, from summer to spring, as I entered Pennsylvania.
Houston was hotter, drier and browner than Singapore when I began the nearly 2,500km drive at end-March. A week later, cherry trees were showing off their pink and white plumage at street corners in Philadelphia suburbs, helping soften the jolts from pitted roads. And I had to bring out a thin jacket for the morning chill.
President Donald Trump’s war on Iran had just entered the second month and this, too, was knocking about in the court of public opinion.
I caught flashes of the national mood first-hand as I travelled east from Texas, the epicentre of the country’s freshly assertive energy economy, to Pennsylvania, the durable gusher of American politics.
In Texas, the country’s largest Republican state, centuries-old oil firms were anticipating windfalls from the war. As were the money men. For the Wall Street firms, expanding here to cash in on the state’s low taxes and business-friendly laws, volatility set off by the war has meant a bumper quarter.
But households, farmers and ranchers have been looking on uneasily, feeling the squeeze from a war conducted like a disjointed opera, with flourishes of military display accompanied by self-aggrandising boasts of American might.
In Pennsylvania, which delivered the 2024 election to Mr Trump on a cold November night, the Republican Party is now feeling the weight of the war’s consequence.
In the swingiest of swing states, which makes and breaks political fortunes with its disloyal lurches from red to blue and back again, the war has uncovered fresh evidence that the growing ranks of discontented independents, who had turned out for Mr Trump two years ago, are ready to abandon ship in the Nov 3 midterm congressional elections.
Democrats are on alert, eyeing a flip. If independents bolt amid backlash from the war, it would send a seismic rebuke echoing from Philadelphia, the state capital and birthplace of American democracy, where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and the US Constitution drafted in 1787.
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and West Virginia, the reliably Republican states on my route, are not usually prone to get sentimental about Washington – but Mr Trump gets the benefit of doubt here. Not so much because they agree with this war but because they expect victory. And because a majority of voters here are reflexively anti-Democrat.
While Mr Trump and his Secretary of War Pete Hegseth invoke scripture to frame the conflict as righteous, most Americans – or at least the ones I met – remain neither swept by fervour nor roused to revolt. They are in the grip of something more difficult to mobilise: doubt.
And that matters, because wars usually become politically powerful when there is a shared story.
After the Sept 11 Al-Qaeda attacks in 2001, Americans bonded over grief and anger over the unprecedented assault on the homeland. During the 2003 Iraq war that followed, there was a sense of urgency and competence before then President George W. Bush’s “weapons of mass destruction” story fell apart.
The Feb 28 war has supplied no glue to hold the country together, and most Americans are just watching and worrying. It is as though the commander-in-chief was the storyteller-in-chief, and the Americans were not buying the story.
But Mr Trump seems to think he can convert anxiety into support – that if he can just keep the war short and distant, they will come around. He is reading the country not so much as anti-war as risk-averse.
There is some logic in that. Polls say most Americans oppose the war. But they are not appalled enough to drive an anti-war movement. Broad support exists for key US goals like halting Iran’s nuclear programme and preventing Iran from funding terrorists, even if there is no great confidence in the war itself.
Mr Trump continues to project resolve, betting that Americans will tolerate force if its exercise is framed as both limited and successful at the same time. Yet, the national drift is unmistakably towards fatigue.
