When President Trump gave reporters a brief update this week on the accelerating bombing campaign against Iran, he said, “We’re doing very well on the war front.”
That complicated matters for Republicans on Capitol Hill, who have spent the days since the U.S.-Israeli attacks began engaging in semantic gymnastics to describe the widening conflict as a “major combat operation,” a “mission,” “hostilities” or really just anything other than “war.”
“They declared war on us,” Speaker Mike Johnson said of Iran as he repeated the administration’s justification for the offensive. Still, he quickly added, there was, in fact, no war.
“We’re not at war right now,” he said on Wednesday. “We’re four days into a very specific, clear mission — an operation.”
The verbal gyrations reflect the tricky politics of an unpopular war, especially for a party that has long condemned “forever wars” on foreign soil. They also underscore the legal and constitutional questions raised by Mr. Trump’s decision to begin an offensive against Iran without congressional approval.
Under the Constitution, only Congress can declare war. But most Republicans on Capitol Hill have taken the position that it is up to the president alone — not, heaven forbid, the legislative branch — whether to commit U.S. forces to a military mission whose objectives, scope and duration remain a big question mark.
“It’s not a war,” Representative Randy Fine, Republican of Florida, snapped as he made his way to the House floor on Wednesday, employing some tautological reasoning. “The way you are officially at war is Congress declares war, and we haven’t declared war.”
As the Senate prepared to vote on whether Mr. Trump needed to win approval from Congress for the mission, many Republicans employed an exceedingly narrow definition of what would constitute war. They argued that so far, at least, what was happening in the Middle East was not it.
“Listen,” said Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, “if I’m going to commit ground troops into combat, that constitutes war in the constitutional sense and will require some sort of authorization.”
(He voted to block the war powers measure, ensuring that Congress would have no say for now.)
Representative Ken Calvert, the California Republican who serves as the chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, said it was not a boots-on-the-ground issue so much as a time-frame issue.
“This has been about 72 hours,” he said. “I would call it an operation at this point.”
With “war” transforming into the Republicans’ Lord Voldemort on Capitol Hill — otherwise known in “Harry Potter” lore as “He Who Must Not Be Named” — those who accidentally used the word quickly contorted themselves to get out of it.
“This is war, and we’re taking out the threat,” Senator Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, said on Tuesday, echoing top administration officials’ bellicose language in recent days. But he quickly backtracked under questioning from reporters in the basement of the Capitol.
“We haven’t declared war,” Mr. Mullin said. “They called it war. I was saying they declared war on us, but war is ugly.”
When reminded that he had, in fact, used the word, Mr. Mullin replied, “That was a misspoke.”
David Axelrod, who was a top adviser to President Barack Obama, said watching congressional Republicans avoid using a word the president was throwing around freely made him feel like he was watching a performance of Cirque du Soleil.
“You find yourself wondering, how many ways can they bend?” he said.
Mr. Trump, for his part, has described the military operation as a “war” a number of times. In his first comments after launching an attack on Iran, the president said in a recorded video that the mission could result in American casualties, as “often happens in war.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegesth on Wednesday promised an escalation that sounded like “war” to every Democrat listening when he said that the United States was “just getting started” and promised to rain down “death and destruction from the sky, all day long.”
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, later in the day directed the attention of his Republican colleagues to Mr. Hegseth’s remarks.
“To anyone around here who thinks we’re not at war, listen to Hegseth’s press conference,” he said on the Senate floor. “What he is saying loud and clear is this: We’re at war, and this administration is signaling more escalation ahead.”
But for Republican lawmakers to call it a “war,” they would have to concede that the president started one without congressional authorization.
The conflict has so far resulted in the deaths of at least six American service members. And the administration has continued to offer varying and conflicting explanations for striking Iran, raising questions about legality that are easier for lawmakers to deal with if they do not acknowledge that it is a war at all. The military action is deeply unpopular, with about three-fifths of Americans disapproving, according to recent polls.
Not to mention the fact that Mr. Trump ran and was elected as an “America First,” antiwar political candidate, and many of his supporters — the constituents of his Republican allies in Congress — are unhappy with this turn of events. Playing down its scope through language may help blunt some of that blowback.
Democrats sought to capitalize on the friction the war was causing in the MAGA movement.
“This war is costing a billion dollars a day,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, wrote on social media. “They literally are taking away your food and your healthcare for this regime-change war of choice.”
Still, as they banded together to vote down measures to rein in Mr. Trump’s ability to continue the war without Congress, Republicans batted away the term. Some of them reached to World War II as their reference point for what “war” would look like.
“This is an argument about semantics,” Mr. Fine said. “I haven’t seen the Grand Army of the Republic storm the beaches yet. We’ll see what happens.”
At the White House, Mr. Trump did not bother with such subtleties. Wrapping up an event in the Indian Treaty Room on Wednesday afternoon, he noted, “I have to go back and look at the war.”
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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