Have Democrats Fully Capitalized On Trump's Iran War Failure?
A missing promise to end the war is the dog that hasn't barked.
There’s definitely something uncanny about this: We’re five months and 10 days into Donald Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and it’s been about five months and five days since he lost it. Trump won’t end the war because he can’t accept terms that make clear how badly he fucked this up, and we’re all captive to his narcissism. The result is that U.S. credibility is in tatters. Everyone’s mad at us for creating a global energy crisis, and rightly so. Nobody trusts Trump to honor his word, because he’s a liar. Nobody trusts him to make good on his threats, because he makes them endlessly but never follows through. He’s depleted U.S. munitions stockpiles badly enough to leave service members, and allies that rely on our preparedness, vulnerable to adversaries.
It’s a cockup of world historic proportions. And yet… it’s often not among Trump’s biggest day-to-day political liabilities. The war is slow-bleeding support from the GOP. But there are no sustained calls for Trump to resign in disgrace, or face impeachment, or any consequences that match the scale of the failure. And yet we know, because we weren’t born yesterday, that presidents and cabinet officials have been mired in damaging controversy for much smaller military blunders. Remember Barack Obama’s redline in Syria? Or Benghazi?
The chain of accountability is broken. (What else is new, right?) But it’s actually broken in multiple places.
Fault resides primarily with Trump and his enablers. He started the war. He refuses to end it. Some of his toadies want him to escalate. The ones who understand that it’s a political albatross won’t cross him. As long as Republicans remain in the majority, pathetic and in Trump’s thrall, the war can’t be forced to an end.
But trying to force the war to an end might change the politics over time. A level down, we’ve seen multiple efforts to pass War Powers Act resolutions—but Republicans can block those. The resolutions drive accountability, insofar as Republicans have to defend their votes, but the mechanism isn’t strong enough to actually change policy.
The last alternative is the power of the purse. Congress authorizes and funds military operations. If those bills explicitly defunded the war, and became law, Trump would have to pull us out of it. If he vetoed them, or if Democrats blocked them from passing unless they defunded the war, the Pentagon would be severely disrupted. Under most circumstances, this would be unthinkable. But return to those first paragraphs. Remind yourself just how insane this situation is. It’s remarkable that the House isn’t holding weekly votes to impeach Pete Hegseth, if not Trump himself. A defunding rider is tame, by comparison.
This is the dog that hasn’t barked. Part of the reason Trump has avoided an appropriate level of political accountability for this failed war is that the whole system is underreacting to it. It’s a bad omen for the new year.
What do you think would happen to Democratic Party approval ratings if Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries wrote up an agenda like the one I proposed here, including a promise that if Democrats win the election, they’ll defund Trump’s war against Iran? Would they go up or down?
What if they were able to communicate, unabashedly, that Trump had humiliated America. That through his own foolishness, megalomania, and dishonesty, he had made the United States seem weak and feckless to the world. That this is, for the pendency of his regime, a disaster for U.S. strategic power—but also that it’s fundamentally aberrant. Something Democrats will set right once Trump is gone.
What if Democrats told the electorate, but also the world, that American renewal could begin early, but only if voters gave Democrats enough power to dog walk Trump to the end of his term. No more threats to invade or occupy enemies or allies on a lark. No more denial about the failure of his foreign policy. He might serve his last two years in full—Republicans could still ensure his acquittal on impeachment—but he’d be muzzled and on a tight leash?
What if, upon making this promise, the overwhelming majority of frontline Democrats, from Abdul el-Sayed in his Senate race, to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez representing a tough House district, posted this new contract with America to their campaign websites, signaling Dems will be unified enough in 2027 to make good on their commitments? The election, suddenly a referendum on the war.
A Truce Is Still Possible
The conservative movement infiltrated the Republican Party, then took it over completely, to establish a beachhead from which to attack (and ideally dismantle) liberal government in the United States.
Would Democrats become more popular, or less? Would their odds of winning both the House and Senate climb, or fall?
The war in Iran is something like a 33-67 issue. It seems to me that Democrats are leaving popularity on the table, and giving Trump breathing room he doesn’t deserve, by mostly allowing the war’s unpopularity do their political work for them. If they want to draw the political benefit of being the antiwar party, they have to actually claim it.
To date, Dems are not running on a consensus agenda of any kind. Few if any Democrats support the war. Many are running against it, in general terms. But they aren’t aligned on a particular policy, or a story about how to carve a path from here to a post-Trump future, where his legacy is discredited and swept into the dustbin.
This is revealing in several ways.