Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
Donald Trump announced a temporary ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday evening, a relief to those watching in horror to see whether the U.S. president would follow through on what looked like a threat to openly commit war crimes. But before that happened, a lot of liberals spent the day furious about Trump’s morning vow on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if the Islamic republic refused to strike a deal. And while the anger at Trump was implied, they reserved special opprobrium for Democrats.
“We don’t need punditry from you, Senator. We need you to call for, and take, action,” the progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan admonished Chuck Schumer after the Senate Democratic leader criticized Trump’s threat as the work of a “sick person.” The left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, the subject of an ongoing debate over whether his controversial statements about Israel, Hamas, and 9/11 should preclude Democratic candidates from associating with him, wondered (in all caps, but I’ll spare you) whether the party’s elected officials had “something to say about this strong language or should we have the 15th ‘Hasan hates Israel and America we cant have him at our events’ convo?!” “Oh my bad, I didn’t know Jeffries tweeted!” mocked Briahna Joy Gray, a former top Bernie Sanders campaign staffer, referring to Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the top House Democrat. In some cases, the calls were coming from inside the House: “The only people the base are more upset with than Donald Trump is the ineffective leadership of the Democratic Party to stand up when a president of the United States is threatening genocide,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California argued on MS NOW. Nina Turner, another former Sanders adviser, simply tweeted, “Do something.”
Some of these critics have made successful careers out of attacking their party from the inside; others are questionably described as Democrats at all. But their outrage seems to channel how a lot of rank-and-file Democratic voters currently see their party’s elected officials: as feckless losers refusing to stand up to a president who’s running roughshod over the Constitution and publicly flirting with genocide. That sentiment has helped drive the Democratic Party’s approval ratings to historic lows, magnified activists’ and candidates’ calls to oust Schumer and Jeffries as its congressional leaders, and fueled antiestablishment challenges to incumbents in races across the country.
That perspective is understandable and, given the stakes, maybe even psychologically necessary. It’s jarring and upsetting to contemplate your country’s nuclear-armed president intentionally targeting untold numbers of civilians in violation of international law. And in a constitutional democracy, the thinking goes, surely there’s some way for the Democrats who occupy a co-equal branch of government to prevent that. But there are a few problems with this view. The biggest is believing that the minority party can rein in an errant, possibly unstable president if only it tries hard enough. Disheartening though it may be, there’s very little Democrats in Congress can do on their own so long as the Republicans who control Washington—because Americans chose to put them in power—continue to back Trump. Whether it’s cutting Medicaid or courting Armageddon, the unfortunate reality is that elections have consequences.
Most Democrats are, in fact, already doing the things their intraparty critics are demanding—only to run into near-uniform GOP opposition. Congressional Democrats have repeatedly proposed resolutions that would have curtailed Trump’s ability to attack Iran, but the Republicans who control the House and Senate blocked them. While the 25th Amendment does in theory allow Trump’s Cabinet to remove him for being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” that’s not a lever Democrats can pull either; a group that regularly tongue-bathes the president with paeans to his leadership seems unlikely to use it. And even if it did, Trump could contest the effort to replace him, a move that would require supermajorities in Congress to override. Liberal critics’ calls for Democrats to try to sway enough Republicans for that to happen are understandable but unrealistic; real life is not an episode of The West Wing. Many Democrats have also taken their case against the war public, attending No Kings protests last month that featured anti-war slogans and helped drive voter approval of the conflict further underwater. Getting crosswise with public opinion is sometimes enough to constrain a president. But as Trump has repeatedly proved, it usually isn’t enough to constrain this president.
Despite the futility of the endeavor, many Democrats keep trying anyway. In the hours after Trump issued his threat to end Iranian civilization, dozens called for his impeachment or removal. Others demanded that Republican leaders, whose assent they need to reconvene Congress, immediately come back to Washington to vote on resolutions that would end the war. Henry Cuellar, one of just four House Democrats who previously opposed such a measure, now says he would support it. Some of his colleagues have already proposed articles of impeachment against Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
But until more congressional Republicans get on board, those efforts are doomed to fail. So far, just two—Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rep. Nathaniel Moran of Texas—have directly criticized Trump over his threat. Several have instead defended it. Rep. Sheri Biggs called it “peace through strength” on Tuesday. “He’s negotiating Trump style,” Rep. Don Bacon told Axios. “Iran would be wise to take President Trump at his word,” Senate Republicans’ official X account posted. Only a handful of sitting GOP lawmakers have indicated support for Democratic proposals to end the war, and the president would likely veto any that pass; overruling him would require dozens of Republican votes. Several have found ways to avoid blaming Trump for the conflict, and none have called for his impeachment. Unless the war escalates again, even a tenuous ceasefire likely makes that still more far-fetched. “It’s called The Art of the Deal for a reason, panicans and leftists,” Rep. Randy Fine of Florida crowed after Trump announced a two-week pause in the fighting.
Some Democrats have accordingly tried to set expectations that may be less satisfying but are certainly more honest. “Unfortunately, invoking the 25th is not realistic right now, given his oddball cabinet of sycophants and eccentrics, and Republican ‘spines of foam,’ ” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island posted Tuesday. Or as Pod Save America host and former Barack Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau put it, “Everyone can (rightly) call for impeachment and the 25th amendment all we want, but—as ever—Trump will remain in office because Republicans want him there. Their party must be annihilated in the next election, and the election after that. It’s the only way.”
Those kinds of platitudes often invite eye-rolling complaints that Democrats are grasping for norms in an abnormal time. But as the party’s romping performance in elections in Georgia and Wisconsin on Tuesday proved, they’re also correct. And they highlight an important irony to all of this intramural criticism: Some of the people now braying for Democrats to Do Something are the same ones who helped ensure that the party wouldn’t be able to. Forced to decide in 2024 between Trump and Kamala Harris, several of Democrats’ loudest current detractors on the left instead created a permission structure for voters to evade the choice. Piker refused to endorse Harris because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza, a decision he has stood by. Gray, the former Sanders adviser, wrote two days before the election that “a vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for genocide,” adding, “Genocide is worse than Donald Trump.” The president’s threats suggest they weren’t so mutually exclusive after all.
I’m not arguing that criticizing Democrats is never fair game, and certainly Gaza isn’t the only reason Trump won. But despite many voters’ frustration with the two-party system, American elections remain binary choices; elevating a divisive issue for one side definitionally risks helping the other, and it’s clear that making Gaza the preeminent moral question of the race for some voters ended up flattening important differences between the candidates that also carried stakes. One of those, it turns out, was over Iran. About a month before the election, after the Islamic republic launched a barrage of missiles at Israel, Harris vowed that she would “never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend U.S. forces and interests against Iran and Iran-backed terrorists.” Yet she also told voters that diplomacy was her “preferred path” to stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, criticized Trump for ripping up the deal the Obama administration struck to prevent that, and pledged to “work with our allies and partners to disrupt Iran’s aggressive behavior and hold them accountable.” Does that sound like a politician who would have blundered into a war of choice against her advisers’ counsel, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s urging, and without the support of many U.S. allies?
Despite Trump’s manifest history of lying, it’s understandable that some voters were taken in by his pledge not to start new wars. It’s less defensible that people whose job is to opine on politics decided to overlook Trump’s record of threatening Iran, his naked alliance with Netanyahu, and the bellicose rhetoric that defined his first-term approach to foreign policy—particularly when the alternative was a relatively banal, mainstream Democrat.
It has become a common lament that America’s two dominant political parties are failing to serve most voters’ needs. And it is no doubt maddening for many, including those who did back Harris, that elected Democrats can’t do more to reel Trump in. But the guardrails of our politics are only as high as voters allow them to be. In 2024, near majorities of those who cast ballots chose to make Trump president and to put Republicans in charge of Congress, no Electoral College quirks or gerrymandering shenanigans required. And in America, at least for now, you get what you vote for.
