Well over a year into Donald Trump’s disruptive second term, few believed the US president could still genuinely shock. But at 8.06am on Tuesday, he did just that, with an apocalyptic threat on Truth Social to destroy a “whole civilisation” in Iran – a country of more than 90 million people. Democrats abandoned their forced restraint and immediately began to call for Trump’s removal from office.
Yet beneath Democrats’ near-universal opposition to what they call the president’s “war of choice” are simmering tensions about the way the US should engage with the world, especially when it comes to the Middle East. Since losing to Trump and his America First agenda in 2024, leading progressives have urged Democrats to reclaim the “anti-war” mantle.
“Voters, especially young people and working families, are exhausted by ‘forever wars’,” said Naveed Shah, an Army veteran and political director at the progressive veterans’ advocacy group Common Defence. Now that Trump has opened a new chapter of US-led warfare in the Middle East, these voices on the left are growing louder, sensing a rare opportunity to reorient American foreign policy around a working-class worldview.
Matt Duss, executive vice-president of the Centre for International Policy and a former top foreign policy aide to Senator Bernie Sanders, said the current conflict has “clarified for much of the Democratic party that the left is correct about foreign policy”. He called the Iran war “another expression of Trump’s authoritarianism” and warned against a “Republican lite” approach to foreign policy embraced by Democrats who believe the answer is to find a “nicer way” of “doing global hegemony”.
Though Trump ultimately backed off his most dire threat, congressional Democrats are once again under pressure to use the few tools at their disposal to rein in the president. This week, they came out by the dozen to call for Trump’s removal, as constituents flooded congressional phonelines. Any attempt to impeach Trump while Republicans control Congress is doomed to fail, and some Democratic leaders fear a focus on impeachment will distract from their economic message.
Pennsylvania US representative Madeleine Dean said pursuing impeachment was not the “best use” of Democrats’ time. “He is eligible for and should be held to impeachment,” she said. “But that’s not the fight right now. Right now, we have to end this war.” Democratic leaders have said they will continue to force war powers resolutions on the Iran war, and the Trump administration faces demands for more congressional briefings and justification for hundreds of billions in new defence spending.
