The Trump administration’s flailing, and at just the wrong time.

With a little over two months until the mid-terms, The White House finds itself embroiled in a multi-front war against everyone from Ahmad Vahidi to Mark Carney to long bond traders.

All of Donald Trump’s current battles constitute wars of choice, and tentative signs of stabilization in the long-end of the Treasury curve aside, he’s losing every one of them.

Trump’s “economic D-Day” for Iran was anticlimactic even as a ballyhooed Trump unveils go (Bloomberg called the new sanctions push “less Normandy and more Grenada”) and in addition to being transparently asinine, the Canada tariffs are a cautionary tale vis-à-vis the peril of attaching ruinous consequences to self-imposed deadlines.

There was nothing special about August 21 — no reason why that had to be the day for a comprehensive trade deal with Canada (and I’ll set aside the fact that there already was such a deal, and one negotiated by Trump himself no less). The statute Trump invoked in applying the new levies simply states that duties can’t take effect earlier than 30 days following the statute’s invocation, which is to say The White House wittingly put itself on the shortest possible clock.

In giving nations with financial ties to Iran a deadline for severing any and all economic links with the IRGC, Trump’s doing the same thing with his “economic asphyxiation” campaign against Iran. The risk is that “some” countries (read: China) tell him to kick rocks, thereby forcing Bessent to go ahead with secondary sanctions that no one really wants to apply.

Bessent didn’t do himself any favors by describing the potential impact of those measures in apocalyptic terms. “We are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior,” he said, when asked why Trump didn’t pull the trigger Monday on new measures targeting transactions with the regime. “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?”

That was a very silly thing to say: The implication is that Bessent will wittingly bring about a financial crisis if China doesn’t comply. There’s precedent for noncompliance. Last year, Beijing famously won a staring contest with Trump when The White House tried to strong-arm China on trade the same way Trump’s attempting to muscle Canada.

Hilariously, China lauded Carney for matching Trump’s 50% tariffs with ruinously high levies on $20 billion of US goods. The Global Times on Tuesday called Canada’s retaliatory measures a “Chinese-style counter-attack.” “More countries,” the propaganda tabloid declared, “are realizing that making concessions won’t necessarily result in stability.”

Flummoxed, Trump’s resorting to absurdist threats that even the basest of his supporters will surely recognize as floundering. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America,” he said Tuesday. “[W]e don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

That’s where we are, or I should say it’s where Trump and the GOP are with just 10 weeks to go before Americans pass judgment on an exceedingly unpopular president via down-ballot elections.

This should go without saying, but the Canada tariff war’s totally unsustainable. It’s not just the levies themselves, it’s the terrible optics and the impossibility of explaining to the American public why these levies are necessary.

Anyone over the age of 30 in America knows “blame Canada” was a standing joke pre-Trump. The idea of a war — any kind of war — with the Canadians was a meme before memification was a trend.

There’s no way to sell an extortion campaign against Canada to the US electorate. It’s not a serious proposal. Even the narrow subset of Americans with a reason to be aggrieved at Canada over trade is unlikely to accept the idea that diplomacy has run its course — that the US has no choice but to bully, threaten and otherwise lean on its famously congenial northern neighbor.

As to Iran, Trump should’ve pulled up stakes and declared victory months ago. I said it over and over again. There weren’t any boots on the ground. Everything that could’ve been accomplished from the air was accomplished — and then some.

By perpetuating the conflict beyond what was necessary to prove a point about this president’s willingness to avail himself of options that no other US president was prepared to entertain, Trump’s created the very thing he promised to avoid: An open-ended Mideast entanglement.

For now, there are still no American boots on Iranian soil. But the longer this goes on with the Guards appearing implacable and China unlikely to make anything resembling a clean break with Iran economically, the more tempting the ground option will seem. Trump’s not going to get from Iran what he’s after with secondary sanctions. And that assumes he can even articulate what it is he wants from Tehran.

That latter point underscores the real problem for this administration 19 months in: It’s not obvious, at all, what Trump’s trying to achieve by turning US trade and foreign policy into an around-the-clock, seven-days-a-week soap opera.

Blaming immigrants may be a winner on the campaign trail, even when you can’t say precisely what it is you’re blaming them for, or offer any evidence to support your xenophobic domestic policies. But “blame Canada” is a joke, figuratively and, as noted above, literally. And I dare say not one in 1,000 Americans can tell you what the point is in Iran. The fact that Trump most assuredly isn’t that one in 1,000 is a serious problem.

I image most GOPers in Washington see in all of this a hopeless muddle, and I have to say: I’m not “impressed” (with the scare quotes to denote that there are probably better word choices) so far with Trump’s efforts to create an unlevel playing field for the mid-terms.

If he’s serious about stacking the deck such that Republicans are playing with loaded dice, he needs to get moving. Because the mid-term clock’s ticking down even faster than his poll numbers.