Democrats Denounce Trump’s Iran Attack, but Subtle Divisions Emerge
“Democrats are divided over President Trump’s decision to strike Iran without congressional approval. While most oppose the attack, some support the administration’s goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This division reflects broader debates within the party about national security and military intervention in the Middle East.
While most Democrats have opposed his decision, their responses reveal differences over Middle East policy and national security that loom over the party’s future.
Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed President Trump’s decision to strike Iran without seeking congressional approval. But in significant if subtle ways, the attacks have magnified fissures in the party over the country’s national security interests and America’s use of military force in the Middle East.
The questions many Democrats are raising over whether Mr. Trump was justified in launching the attacks deepened on Sunday after the first American casualties were announced by the Pentagon.
Yet even as they prepared to return to Washington to debate a military attack that could spur a broader conflict, tensions were emerging within the party over how stridently to oppose Mr. Trump’s use of force to achieve regime change and limit Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear arms.
And a small handful of Democrats, including some of the party’s strongest supporters of Israel, which conducted strikes alongside the U.S., have backed the administration’s operation.
The disagreements reveal a Democratic Party still searching for direction after its devastating defeat in the 2024 election. On issues from taxes to immigration to Israel, the party is remaking its views in real time, as Democratic lawmakers react to Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.
“We need to take a very firm, ‘hell no’ approach and not equivocate on it or suggest that some drawn out process would in any way justify what he’s trying to do,” said Representative Eric Swalwell, who is running for governor of California in a crowded primary. “In no world do I see this being acceptable for our values,” he said.
Mr. Swalwell reacted — like many in his party — to the strikes on Iran with furious opposition, accusing Mr. Trump of risking the lives of American service members without presenting evidence that America’s security was at risk.
But others took a more tempered approach, showing continued support for the decades-old bipartisan consensus that Iran poses a threat to American national security and should not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.
They criticized the administration for launching strikes without consulting Congress, while also casting the Iranian regime as a uniquely dangerous actor responsible for the deaths of Americans and its own citizens.
“We can’t allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon,” Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday. But, he added, “this administration, my sense is that they did not go into this with any kind of strategic plan. It was an operation with no discussion about what comes next.”
Republicans, too, have been navigating internal political divides over the military attack, with a handful of prominent MAGA figures arguing that Mr. Trump has betrayed his promise to pull the nation back from foreign wars. The president, who appeared only briefly in public view on Sunday, made little effortbefore the attack to lay out the case for a military assault against Iran. Mr. Trump said in a video released on Saturday that his objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
As the attack injected another unpredictable element into an unsettled and volatile political environment, potential contenders for the party’s next presidential nomination offered a range of responses to the still-evolving conflict.
Some Democrats, including Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, criticized the repressiveness of the Iranian regime and insisted in the hours after the attack that it must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, even as they slammed Mr. Trump’s approach, saying it endangered Americans and undermined the country’s national security interests.
But another group, including Representative Ro Khanna, of California, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive from New York, kept their focus squarely on Mr. Trump. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez charged in a statement that the president made “a deliberate choice of aggression when diplomacy and security were within reach,” accusing him of lying to the nation.
Such crosscurrents in the party date back more than two decades to the war in Iraq, when Democrats fractured over whether to authorize the invasion in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
That issue lingered into the 2008 presidential primary, becoming a major fault line in the tight primary race between then-Senators Barack Obama, who opposed the invasion from the start, and Hillary Clinton, who later characterized her vote for the war as a “mistake.”
Now, a number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona and the Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine, have referenced their service during those conflicts as they express their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.
Mr. Gallego recounted the fear his mother felt when he was serving as a Marine in Iraq, an experience that he said left him struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome for years.
“There’s nothing worse than seeing your friends die for a cause that is not in the national interest of this country,” Mr. Gallego said in an interview with CNN broadcast on Sunday. “There is no leadership right now that’s coming from this president, and we’re in the middle of dropping bombs right now, and men and women are dying.”
Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut described the operation as a “disaster” and “illegal” on Sunday, saying Mr. Trump was involving the nation in a “quagmire” to distract from crises at home that would not result in a democratic Iran or the end of the country’s nuclear program.
Some strategists argued that the politics favor that kind of fierce opposition over the more cautious approach congressional Democratic leadership has taken.
“It’s very obvious to me that the hemming and hawing here around a haphazard regime-change war from a president at 38 percent approval rating is just nuts,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a top adviser to President Obama and now co-hosts “Pod Save America,” a liberal podcast. “People didn’t vote for it. They don’t want it. They don’t trust the guy executing it. It could not be more disconnected from the things they care about.”
Polls conducted before the assault indicated that a majority of Americans opposed the United States initiating a strike on Iran. But it’s unclear how they will react to an ongoing operation that resulted both in the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for decades and considered an enemy of the United States, and three U.S. service members.
A small minority of Democratic lawmakers argued that regardless of the politics and their distrust of the Trump administration, the strike was in the national security interests of the U.S.
Representative Greg Landsman of Ohio, one of a few of Democrats who defended the action in Iran, said he planned to vote against a resolution that would restrain Mr. Trump’s ability to continue the military operation.
Mr. Landsman, who is running for re-election in a politically competitive district in Ohio, said he hoped voters would respect his independence to support the broad mission of an operation that he believes is in the best interest of American national security.
“It’s not an easy position for me to take within the party, but it’s what I believe,” he said. “It has nothing to do with politics, which is what I think people expect when it comes to these big decisions.”
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.“
No comments:
Post a Comment