Why is the resistance failing to resist?

Because too many Democrats in Congress don’t actually disagree with Trump

For years, Democrats have had one message. Trump is bad. He’s a criminal. He’s a fascist. He’s a threat to democracy. He’s breaking everything.

And yet he keeps winning. He keeps consolidating power. He keeps getting stronger. We are less than a year and a half into this administration and he has already started an illegal war with Iran, backed a genocide in Gaza that has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and called for regime change in a sovereign nation on live television. Death and destruction is our primary export right now and it’s a bipartisan product.

Every time Democrats lose another fight, they act confused about it. I’m not confused. I’m paying attention.

This is where the American people need resistance. War. Regime change. Bombing a country we were actively negotiating with. Killing a head of state and over a hundred school children in the same weekend. And Democratic leadership isn’t just failing to resist. They’re actively working to make sure nobody else does either.

When Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna put forward a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s war with Iran, Democratic leadership didn’t whip votes for it. Hakeem Jeffries didn’t rally the caucus. Instead, Democrats like Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz came out against it. Moskowitz called it the “Ayatollah Protection Act.” Gottheimer said it would “restrict the flexibility needed” to respond to threats. These are Democrats. Arguing that the president should have a free hand to bomb whoever he wants whenever he wants.

As I told Salon before the bombs even started falling, the Democratic Party that exists now in Congress is very much a party that’s aligned with the war machine, and has been for decades. The core, the corporate Democratic Party, which is the one that’s in charge right now, has been fully in lockstep with the Republican Party on this. That’s one of the places where these two parties have been merged for quite some time.

And it’s not just me saying it. A senior Democratic staffer told reporter Aída Chávez that “leadership rarely comes out and says they oppose these votes outright, because they know the underlying issue is popular with the base. Instead, you see process concerns, timing objections, and caucus-unity arguments used to slow things down or keep members off the record.” That’s the game. They support the war. They just don’t want their fingerprints on it. Saikat Chakrabarti, who co-founded the Justice Democrats, pointed out that members learned from Iraq that it was better for their political futures to cede their constitutional power to the president than to take a vote on a war they support. The support for Iraq cost Hillary Clinton an election. It cost Jeb Bush an election. So now they’d rather make no choice at all.

Ro Khanna, one of the few Democrats actually trying to stop this, said the quiet part out loud. He said the Democrats trying to kill the bill are beholden to “powerful interests that are itching to have regime change in Iran.” He named AIPAC specifically. Chakrabarti pointed to the 149 Democrats who voted for the current defense budget as a proxy for the members of the party who likely support a war with Iran. One hundred and forty nine.

Capitol Hill sources went even further. They told Drop Site News that a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But they also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump. Win-win for Democrats.

Dem insiders were rooting for a war that 76% of Democratic voters oppose because they like the policy and thought it would be good politics. Only 9% of Democrats support military force against Iran. Nine percent. And our leaders are sabotaging the effort to stop it.

And it’s not just a few rogues. As Adam Johnson reported, House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats were working behind the scenes to prevent a vote on the Khanna-Massie resolution even before the bombs started falling. And the New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards, which have weighed in on every major military action in the past fifty years, stayed silent in the weeks leading up to the strikes. They mostly agree that attacking Iran is a good thing and they want Trump to do it, but they know saying that out loud would be toxic. So what we got was a consensus of silence.

Meanwhile John Fetterman goes on Fox News and calls the war powers resolution “an empty gesture” and says the strikes were “right and necessary” and asks God to bless the United States, our military, and Israel. And nobody in leadership kicks him out of the caucus because he’s not actually breaking with them. He’s just saying what a lot of them think.

Look at Jeffries’ actual words after the strikes. He said Iran “must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies.” His only problem is that Trump didn’t fill out the right paperwork first. That’s not opposition. That’s proofreading.

They aren’t interested in stopping the killing. They aren’t interested in the hard work of rebuilding our self sufficiency or our ability to make a living. They aren’t interested in the deep systemic change that propelled Trump to power in the first place. But they love his foreign policy. Some of them love it more than Netanyahu does, and Netanyahu went on television and said this is what he has yearned to do for forty years.

And now Axios reports that Senate Democrats already expect to lose the war powers vote this week. They know it’s symbolic. They’re already pivoting to the “real” fight over war funding. Which means they’ve already accepted the war. They’ve moved on to managing it.

And it’s not just the war. That’s the thing. The war and the economics are the same disease.

Trump broke from the old playbook on economics in ways Democrats can’t. Not because he’s smarter. Because he doesn’t believe in the system the way they do. He looked at forty years of neoliberal economics, at globalization, at free trade, at the idea that the market knows best, and he said out loud what half the country was already thinking. This doesn’t work. It’s broken. The whole thing is rigged.

He was lying. He doesn’t want to fix it. He wants to own it. He wants to be the one doing the rigging. But he named the problem, and that’s more than Democrats have ever been willing to do.

Because Democrats still believe in this system. I laid this out a year ago and nothing has changed. They believe in free markets, globalization, and privatization the way you believe in a religion. Both parties pushed NAFTA, CAFTA, TPP, and every other trade deal that gutted American industry. Since Carter and Clinton, Democrats have been handing off the New Deal state to the private sector. They treat billionaires the way a parish priest treats the guy who donated the new wing of the church. You can’t really go after him. He paid for the building.

This is why they can’t resist Trump in any meaningful way. They don’t want to. They want to resist the chaos, the tweets, the ugliness. But the underlying project of handing this country over to the private sector? That’s not a Trump project. That’s a forty year bipartisan project. Democrats helped build every mile of that road. Their objection is never to the destination. It’s to the driving.

And why would they oppose any of it? This is the same party that built the case for Iraq, gave Bush carte blanche to spy on every American through the Patriot Act, expanded drone warfare under Obama, prosecuted more whistleblowers than every previous administration combined, and treats the Pentagon budget like sacred text. Democrats believe in the security state the same way they believe in the economic system. With the faith of true believers.

They believe in might makes right. They just want the might deployed with better PR.

And that’s the connection people miss. The economics and the war machine aren’t separate things. They’re the same thing. You believe the market should run everything, and when some country doesn’t want to play by your market rules, you bomb them. You believe corporations should control the global economy, and when someone threatens that control, you call it a threat to national security. You say the word evil as a precursor to doing evil. You’ve been doing it for a century. In Iran. In Iraq. In Libya. In Vietnam. In Guatemala. In Chile. Anywhere the local population decides they’d rather own their own resources than let American corporations extract them.

Democrats aren’t against this. They’re for it. They just want it done through institutions. Through the IMF, the World Bank, through trade agreements that look voluntary but aren’t. Through the kind of coercion that wears a suit and carries a briefcase instead of a rifle. When the suit doesn’t work, they reach for the rifle too. Ask Libya about that.

A few voices in the party actually get it. AOC called the Iran strikes unlawful, unnecessary, and catastrophic. Rashida Tlaib said warmongering politicians from both parties support this war. Zohran Mamdani connected it to what people actually care about. The cost of living, the demand for peace, the basic expectation that government should work for them instead of for Lockheed Martin. Ro Khanna is putting his neck on the line trying to force a vote that his own party’s leadership is working to undermine. Anti-war candidates are challenging incumbents in primaries this week, running ads about dead school children while AIPAC funnels money through PACs linked to Jeffries to protect the incumbents who won’t oppose the war.

But leadership? Leadership is talking about briefings and process and War Powers resolutions they know won’t survive a veto, when they’re not actively sabotaging the resolutions themselves. It’s 2003 all over again. Democrats who privately think this war is insane but won’t say it because they’re afraid of the attack ad. Afraid of looking weak. Afraid of AIPAC funding their primary opponent. Afraid of being called the “Ayatollah Protection Act” by members of their own caucus.

So they’ll do what they always do. Quibble about procedure. Demand oversight. Fund the war anyway.

And this is why “save democracy” never lands as a message. People already know democracy is broken. They live in a country where their government doesn’t reflect their will. When Democrats scream “Trump is destroying democracy” the honest response from most Americans is what democracy? The one where my town lost its hospital and its factory in the same decade and nobody in Washington noticed? You can’t save something people don’t believe they have.

American soldiers are dead in Kuwait right now. Iranian children are dead in their classrooms. Oil prices are spiking. Airports are closing. The entire global economy is teetering. All because a foreign leader who spent forty years lobbying for this moment finally found a president willing to give it to him. And the loyal opposition, the party that’s supposed to represent an alternative? Only 7% of their own voters support this war and they can’t even bring themselves to oppose it.

The consensus held through Bush. It held through Obama. It held through Trump’s first term. It held through Biden.

And it’s holding right now.

Corbin Trent