No Quarter
And not one more inch.
Three years is longer from certain vantage points than from others. When Joe Biden entered his second year in office, deeply unpopular, nobody in either party worried he’d flail and lash out and abuse power in the vain hope of winning back the admiration of his lost supporters. To say nothing of trying to steal elections. Those three years were long, but they weren’t that long.
Today, even one year may prove longer than the world can bear. Its only true superpower is captive to a venal, faithless old man, who’s as desperate and error prone as he’s ever been.
We’ve had to live too long already with the intolerable risk of handing a man like Donald Trump the power to deploy nuclear weapons. The Republicans who now pretend to believe this is all Trump Derangement Syndrome once freely acknowledged that no responsible party or nation would do such a thing.
The allure of power convinced these Republicans to muffle their alarm, and over time, many of them surely grew complacent. In some sense, the fact that Trump’s the deranged one has insulated the world from the risks he poses, because we’re more tolerant of nonsense out of him than we would be from someone with a modicum of virtue. We all have senses and we can all see that he’s a buffoon. We write off his provocations and miscues as yet more buffoonery, and resolve to tolerate it until he passes from the scene.
Suddenly that insulation is worn thin.
Trump attacked a huge, oil-rich, geographically pivotal country, and killed all of its top leaders, for no articulable reason. He blundered the world into a destabilizing mess, and—unlike an illegal tariff or a blustery threat—he has no way to undo it. Iran is obviously overpowered, but its remaining leaders are at least running an OODA loop, with a clear objective in mind: the survival of their regime.
Trump, by contrast, runs on ego and domestic political imperatives, both of which Iran can exploit. But what happens if his ego injuries and other setbacks mount? If he were to become sufficiently panicked about a quickening political bleed, would he order a nuclear strike in a last ditch effort to stanch it? Are you sure? Have you seen gas prices over the past week? The labor market? His own assessment of the increased risk of asymmetric counterstrikes within the U.S.?
Or what if the regional conflict goes global. Trump spent his first year in office browbeating Volodymyr Zelensky. Within days of launching this war he approached Zelensky hat in hand for materiel and training to counter Iranian drones. This is good, viewed narrowly, insofar as it will tend to pull the compromised U.S. government closer to the right side of the Ukraine-Russia war, and the western alliance. But that doesn’t necessarily isolate Iran, so much as drive Iran deeper into the arms of Russia and China. How long will Iran remain a mere proxy for those rival powers?
What we need is for Trump to be removed from power, and for whoever replaces him to retreat, while admitting failure and regret. Short of that we definitely need the world to know that the majority of American citizens, and their representatives in the opposition party, can see that this is madness and are trying to stop it.
To their credit, Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed to this war. The incumbents with the toughest elections this November are almost all against it, without worrisome caveats.
Yet many critical actors in the party continue to strategize in the present tense, looking forward only for defensive purposes. It’s the mindset of the Democrats who voted last year to pass the Laken Riley Act, or this year to fund the Department of Homeland Security, because polls ranked immigration as Trump’s best issue, and all they could imagine were future attack ads. More than ever, we need leaders perceptive enough to recognize and anticipate trends. This would come with some risk because the world is full of surprises. But people with moral imagination all knew mass deportation would be unpopular in practice, Trump’s version especially so.
We need that kind of moral imagination right now. Trump has left himself and the country exposed on many fronts, and nothing in the offing should make us suspect he will somehow regain popularity.
Nevertheless, four House Democrats provided the decisive votes on Thursday to kill a resolution, which, if enacted, would have required Trump to seek authorization for his Iran war.
Typically, this kind of vote count is a tell that Democratic leadership facilitated the outcome. That many in the party wanted the resolution to fail, but didn’t want to get caught voting against it. I am not certain that’s what happened in this instance. Skeptical as I am of these leaders, I’m told they tried in earnest to maintain unity, but that their whip effort failed, in part because the same war powers resolution had already failed in the Senate. There was little harm in members voting as they desired.
On its own terms, it’s a small embarrassment. Like an error in baseball with two outs and the bases empty. But it’s a poor omen. They will soon have to make genuinely consequential decisions, and if they provide Republicans decisive votes that allow the war to continue—or help Trump rehabilitate himself in any way—the fallout for the party will be immense. The fallout for the world likely more so.
To be more precise: Democrats need to kill any supplemental war-funding bill. Even if it includes parochial measures that they would normally support. And they need to be supportive if and when a free-agent Democrat like Al Green or Shri Thanedar forces a vote on an impeachment resolution.
They need the courage to say that their goal is to weaken Trump as much as possible. If he can’t be removed from office, he must be placed in a policy straightjacket, because he cannot be trusted with power. If he runs out of the money or munitions he needs to perpetuate his war, then he’ll have to withdraw. Will America be humiliated? Yes. But humiliation was baked in by voters a year and a half ago.
It would be much, much better if we had a simpler mechanism—if the threshold for impeachment and removal were lower, or if Congress could call snap elections.
But since we may well be stuck with Trump for three more years, Democrats can no longer rescue him from his own failures. Not symbolically, as they did this week. Not substantively, as they did when they funded his government, or throughout his COVID failures in 2020. They can’t set a precedent that if our national dishonor becomes too mortifying, they will tidy things up. An onus will fall somewhere. Republicans will try to place it on Democrats to make those three years tolerable. Democrats need to place it on Republicans: to either fix their own mistakes or live with them.
What Trump wants more than anything is the freedom of movement he enjoyed a year ago. He will bully and menace and bait Democrats to get it.
For instance: On Thursday Trump fired Kristi Noem. And good riddance to her. But now the question will come: Shouldn’t Democrats accept this as a concession from Trump, and end the Homeland Security shutdown? Particularly given the heightened risk of reprisal attacks? The answer has to be no. Not if Noem’s designated successor, Markwayne Mullin, promises them the world. And definitely not out of some neurotic fear that the public will blame Democrats if and when a metro bus explodes or a plane falls from the sky.
They shouldn’t cave to this kind of manipulation anymore than they should have helped pass the Laken Riley Act, strategizing in the present tense, looking ahead only for defensive purposes.
Indeed, they should say it now: The blood of Americans who die because of this illegal war—in the theater, while traveling abroad, or within the United States—is all on Donald Trump’s hands. They should believe this in their hearts, because it’s true, but they should also have confidence that they can win the argument.
Trump’s partisan FBI director, Kash Patel, has already failed to stop multiple mass casualty events that even he calls terrorism. One of those killings happened after Patel fired multiple agents in CI-12—the counterintelligence unit that specializes in Iranian threats and spy operations—for imagined disloyalty to Trump.
So far Democrats have made less of this fiasco, politically, than Republicans made in the days after the terrorist attacks in Benghazi—though Republicans had much less to work with.
Worse than failing to impose a political cost on Trump would be actively helping him. Congressional Democrats need to know that if they provide the decisive votes for a war supplemental, they will endanger every incumbent Democrat with a primary ahead of them. Endangered Dems should press them publicly and privately not to put their own hangups or parochial concerns above the cause of global peace. Unless, of course, the politics of poll chasing is really just a thin excuse for chickenshit behavior: The polling here is on the right side.
If Trump wants something from Democrats, he should have to beg for it, and submit to enforceable constraints. Enough was enough long before we got so close to the sum of all fears.
Chuck Schumer is not up to this task, which he has proven over and over and over. He is bought and paid for by AIPAC $$. He needs to be put out to pasture immediately. We need leadership NOW.
Why haven't the Democrats done more with the memory of the six American soldiers killed needlessly in this fiasco? Bring the families to congress. Make Mike Johnson and the others look into their faces. Put a human face on what has happened, and what is to come. I seem to recall the GOP brought family members of the ones who died at Benghazi to their convention. We need to risk being accused of "using these families for political purposes." It's an easy to bat that away with telling whoever says this that these are real people and the President and his War Hawks need to see that (like they'll ever care).