Two Saturdays ago, I found myself on the streets of a small, down-at-heel Republican town in northwestern Connecticut where dozens of protesters had gathered to join the millions who took to the streets across the nation to oppose Donald Trump’s increasingly autocratic presidency. Wielding handmade signs filled with corny puns, they braved the spitting rain to declare that the United States would not be ruled by a self-proclaimed king. It was, by some estimates, the biggest single-day protest in American history, driven by genuine anger at, among other outrages, Trump’s aggressive and unlawful deployment of the American military on the streets of Los Angeles.
A week later, Trump unlawfully deployed the American military once again, dispatching B-2 bombers to drop so-called bunker busters on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Trump ordered this unprovoked attack, apparently at the behest of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, without consulting Congress, much less seeking its approval, another breach of the norms and laws of the United States. It was also a clear betrayal of a core promise of Trump’s campaign to return to the presidency — an America First foreign policy that would avoid bloody entanglements in the kind of faraway wars that tore the country apart over more than two decades.
I waited in vain for some kind of galvanized response — protests, petitions, anything — to the threat of America starting another war. I wasn’t really surprised that it did not come. Unlike most people around the globe, Americans, by dint of geography, history and temperament, enjoy an illusory wall between the domestic and the foreign.
But the dark genius of the first months of Trump 2.0 has been collapsing that distinction, turning domestic enemies — pro-Palestine students, unauthorized migrants, elite universities — into threats from abroad. That is the sort of thing autocrats everywhere do, but the nature of the American system of government, and Trump’s canny manipulation of it, has given him outsized power. By couching fights with purported internal enemies as matters of national security and foreign policy, areas where by law and custom presidents have broad authority, Trump has unshackled himself.
With his strike on Iran, Trump moved on to the corollary, recasting distant trouble as an immediate threat on the home front. For all his America First posturing, Trump’s adventurism abroad and his aggression at home are closely twinned. In both, he claims extraordinary powers, under the banner of protecting America and unfettered by any kind of norms or congressional checks, to do whatever he wants.
This is a grave threat. It’s also a tantalizing opportunity. Because for all the mind-mangling speed of events and the strange place Iran occupies in the American psyche, it is clear that a majority of Americans, stretching from progressives to MAGA populists, oppose and fear American warmaking. It’s equally clear that a broad swath of society opposes Trump’s autocratic arrogations of domestic power; just look at the spread and scale of the No Kings protests and his slumping polling numbers on issues he used to dominate, including the economy. Finding a way to combine these two objections — to fuse, as Trump does, the domestic with the foreign — is a means to a properly majoritarian politics in the United States.
Though the prospect of war with Iran seems for now to have dissipated with Trump’s sudden announcement of a cease-fire on Monday evening, the truth of what it exposed hasn’t gone anywhere. We’ve just seen how Trumpism can be stopped. The hard question is who could unite this majority, and how.
It certainly will not be elites in either party, if the past two weeks are anything to go by. Many Democratic leaders were initially wary that the No Kings protests would play into Trump’s hands, sparking violent confrontations that would seem to justify his aggressive use of military force on American streets. “The protests could also — and already kind of have — go sideways for us,” Matt Bennett, co-founder of Third Way, a centrist think tank aligned with Democrats, told The Wall Street Journal.
Ultimately, the protests were a success, drawing huge, peaceful crowds. That can hardly have been a surprise — Trump’s popular approval on immigration, his signature issue, has been floundering in recent months as masked ICE agents have snatched longtime residents with no criminal record off the streets. Yet leading Democrats seemed to have no clue how to harness the extraordinary energy the demonstrations revealed.
A week later, Republicans faced their own internal divides, this time over Iran. Neoconservative stalwarts like Senator Lindsey Graham urged Trump to join Israel’s bombing campaign against Iran and, once he had, even some of Trump’s staunchest Republican critics praised him, seeing the long-cherished goal of toppling Iran’s theocratic regime within their grasp.
But other Republican leaders quietly fretted that Trump’s bombing mission, launched despite his antiwar pledges, would alienate important parts of the fragile coalition that handed them control of the federal government. Before and after the strikes, influential America First politicians and pundits were interestingly loud about their opposition to military action in Iran — figures like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson openly questioned the decision, a rare display of disagreement with a leader who demands, and usually receives, cultish obedience from his partisans.
Republican voters, it’s true, seemed to rally quickly to support Trump’s strikes, with 85 percent saying they approved, according to a CBS News poll released Tuesday. But in social media posts and interviews, prominent Republicans struggled to explain the sudden about-face. Vice President JD Vance, himself a veteran and harsh critic of the post-9/11 wars, was reduced to name calling to explain the seeming contradiction of an antiwar president joining a war of choice.
Whatever Trump’s hardcore base thinks, they part company with the vast majority of their fellow citizens. Almost two-thirds of independents strongly disapproved, along with 87 percent of Democrats. Even more strikingly, nearly two-thirds of all respondents said Trump needed congressional approval for any future military action against Iran.
This poll was taken before the leak on Tuesday of a preliminary intelligence report assessing the strikes that found that, far from permanently destroying Iran’s nuclear program, as Trump claimed, they merely caved in the facilities’ entryways. It also concluded that Iran had likely moved its enriched uranium stockpile elsewhere. In all, the report said, the attack probably set Iran’s nuclear program back by just a few months. It would appear that American military pilots had undertaken a complex, costly and potentially deadly mission for very little indeed.
This ambiguity and ambivalence chimed with the response of podcasters who speak not just to Trump’s base but also to a broader section of Americans who decided to give Trump a second chance as president. Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump in 2024, told Senator Bernie Sanders on Tuesday that Iran divides the MAGA base because “one of the things they voted for was no war.”
“Well, now it seems like we’re in a war,” Rogan went on. “And it’s quick. We’re six months in and that’s already popped off.”
The podcaster Theo Von, a young comedian with a broad audience in Trump World, seemed genuinely anguished about the prospect of a new war. “I don’t want people I know, my friends, getting called up. I don’t want the children of my friends getting called over to die,” he said on his show. “I don’t even understand how it’s an option.”
Neither do I. Trump’s strikes on Iran were unprovoked and unjustified. They were illegal under international law, according to scholars and former government officials. Trump ripped up the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, seemingly out of spite and to cosplay toughness. Since then, the Iranian regime has resumed its work, enriching ever more uranium. Iran has every reason to sprint toward building a weapon to thwart new attacks.
For all his vaunted deal-making skills, Trump was unable or unwilling to make a nuclear deal with Iran, so he decided to send bombs instead. Who knows if the fragile cease-fire Trump majestically declared will hold, especially if Israel decides that the American strikes didn’t do enough to incapacitate Iran. Having intervened once, it is easy to imagine a slide toward deeper American military involvement. Other governments across the world, meanwhile, are taking note. Who could blame them if they conclude they have little choice but to pursue nuclear weapons to protect their sovereignty?
Just as he has failed to end the war in Ukraine and stop the slaughter in Gaza, just as he has failed to persuade Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel, just as he has failed to strike meaningful trade agreements with our most important trading partners after announcing, canceling, then reimposing ruinous tariffs, Trump has utterly failed to avoid dragging the United States into another Middle East morass.
This would seem like an opening for the Democratic Party as it struggles to come to grips not only with its defeat in 2024 but also with its deep unpopularity with its own voters, who see the party’s leaders as weak and ineffective.
“This is a golden opportunity,” Matt Duss, a former foreign policy adviser to Sanders, told me. Trump is “launching a war that a majority of Americans oppose, a super majority of independents and Democrats oppose. It connects to all the bad stuff he’s doing here at home, it’s what a classic authoritarian does.”
But Trump’s great skill is division, and on Iran, Democrats have made his work easy. Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic leaders in the Senate and House, called for Trump to seek congressional authorization, but their objections to his unilateral actions were couched in procedural complaints. Like many top Democrats, both are stalwart supporters of Israel, seemingly wary of even the slightest criticism of its slaughter in Gaza. Neither offered anything close to a full-throated rejection.
Jeffries, asked if he would support a war powers resolution requiring Trump to seek congressional approval to attack Iran, was said to have replied blandly on Monday, “Haven’t taken a look at it.” The complacency was stunning. What could be a more pressing issue for the leader of Democrats in the House right now than a resolution to restrain Trump’s power, like the one proposed by Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican — a measure supported by dozens of Democrats?
“The Democratic Party should get on the right side of both the war and peace issue and the economy issue,” Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman who was the first co-sponsor of Massie’s resolution, told me. Of his party’s leadership he said: “I don’t think if you cheerled for the war in Iraq, if you fought tooth and nail against Obama’s efforts” to make a nuclear deal with Iran, “that you should have any credibility talking about the Democratic Party’s future foreign policy.”
Zohran Mamdani’s stunning upset in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor, built on a simple message — “A city we can afford” was his slogan — delivered with humility and sincerity, shows what’s possible. But leading Democrats, with a few brave exceptions, are afraid of their own shadows. They fret and wring their hands, terrified that defending basic American values like free speech and the rule of law at home will simply make Trump stronger and that moving away from unquestioned support of Israel, come what may, will make them look weak.
For Trump, foreign and domestic policy are inseparable, an ouroboros manifesting his vision of infinite personal power. Many voters who helped elect him are already souring on that vision, and millions more who did not choose him will jump at the chance to join a not-so-silent majority to oppose his kingly ambitions — if only someone would take up the mantle and lead them.
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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
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