Democrats Are Badly Failing to Hold Trump Accountable Over Iran

As the world watches to see whether the two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran ever gets off the ground, President Donald Trump’s genocidal threats against the Iranian people risk fading from our attention. But we cannot move on so quickly from the gravity of Trump’s declaration that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the ceasefire is already at risk of total collapse. On Wednesday, Israel killed over 250 people in Lebanon, despite explicit assurances from international mediators that the ceasefire agreement covered that country; in response, Iran said it had closed the Strait of Hormuz. If war does fully resume, Trump could once again vow to exterminate an entire country of 90 million people.

The second reason is that, even if the ceasefire holds, Trump’s flirtation with genocide is horrifying enough to demand a response all on its own.

Within the US political system, Republicans are too subservient to Trump to mount this opposition. That leaves the Democratic Party—which, despite what many of its defenders say, still has many potential ways to influence the direction of events. So it’s worth assessing how top Democrats are handling this crisis. Unfortunately, the party’s response has mostly been woeful and inadequate.

Democratic leaders have been doing everything in their power to avoid confronting the US-Israeli war against Iran in any meaningful way. When military escalation was still preventable, Democrats refused to act with any urgency. Their most powerful tool would have been a resolution under the War Powers Act. A war powers resolution is privileged, so any member of Congress can force a vote without having to rely on leadership to schedule it. But as I previously reported, top Democrats worked behind the scenes to dampen momentum for Representative Ro Khanna’s Iran war powers resolution, deliberately slow-walking a vote. They publicly committed to forcing another vote on an alternate war powers measure, but failed to schedule it and then went on recess—pushing any action off until mid-April at the earliest.

After the war began, many Democratic lawmakers defaulted to vague concerns with the conflict, criticizing Trump’s war in the language of procedure—briefings, plans, and oversight—rather than in terms of whether it should be happening at all. This approach points to Democrats’ broader calculation. If it were up to them, Trump would carry out the war, weaken Iran, and absorb the political fallout—leaving Democrats free to campaign against it in the midterms.

Rather than act immediately, top Democrats waited until we were on the precipice of a potential nuclear war to fire off tweets calling Trump a “madman” and “unhinged,” rather than force floor fights and recorded vote after recorded vote on war powers resolutions. It wasn’t until Trump threatened to wipe out Iran that so-called opposition party leaders called for Congress to reconvene and “immediately end this reckless war of choice in Iran before Donald Trump plunges us into World War III.”

Individual Democrats began issuing statements, tweets, and videos, many recorded in their suburban backyards, since Congress is on vacation. “There exists a moral order and a moral law in this world, and what Trump is proposing to do is fundamentally evil,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said in a typical post. Dozens of congressional Democrats, along with a smattering of Republicans, including former GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, also called for the 25th Amendment to be used to remove the president over the threats—a politically implausible process that would require the cooperation of the Trump administration and two-thirds of both chambers—or for Trump to be impeached. 

But congressional leaders like Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer wouldn’t even call for those obvious actions. Instead, Schumer and other top senators issued a statement meekly asking Trump to “not follow through on this threat.” Meanwhile, conservative Democrats like New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer sought to make clear that they were mostly on board with Trump’s war. “The ultimate goal is to crush the Iranian regime,” Gottheimer tweeted, before vaguely calling on the White House to “come before Congress and present clear objectives, and brief on our progress.”

Even this mild brand of opposition didn’t last long. As soon as Trump announced that he had agreed to a “double sided CEASEFIRE” with Iran, many Democrats went back to antagonizing Trump for backing away from his threat. “It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran,” Murphy tweeted. “The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking.”

Schumer himself played a role in the pressure campaign pushing Trump to act militarily. In June 2025, ahead of the US strikes on Iran, Schumer mocked the president as “TACO Trump” for being soft on Iran, cautioning the Trump administration against making any “side deals” without Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approval. (TACO is short for Trump Always Chickens Out—coined last year by a Financial Times journalist.)

At least one Democrat, Representative Yassamin Ansari, currently the only Iranian-American in Congress, pointed out the danger of lawmakers goading Trump into returning to the war that nearly led to the use of nuclear weapons. “I do not appreciate anyone – Democrat or Republican – taking this moment to make TACO jokes to say Trump ‘chickened out,’” Ansari said in a tweet. “The president was threatening genocide against 90 million Iranians. I’m grateful there’s a ceasefire & scores of innocent people didn’t die tonight.

Democrats appear to have the votes for an alternate war powers resolution, backed by many of the same lawmakers who voted to defeat the initial Khanna-Massie effort. But that bill, introduced by Gottheimer and others, is already a watered-down measure, as it includes carve-outs for continued troop presence and intelligence sharing.

Trump’s war is deeply unpopular. He is losing it badly. Its continuation would be a catastrophe. In this climate, Democrats have no real excuse left. Even if a strong war powers measure were to fail, forcing the vote would still put members on the record and impose political costs on those willing to go along with the war. Democrats must go all in.