War. Did President Trump get America into one? On this episode of “The Opinions,” the columnists Carlos Lozada, Jamelle Bouie and David French dissect the legality and constitutionality of President Trump’s recent strike on Iran, and the gray areas on who has the power to send out American troops.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Carlos Lozada: Sometimes it makes sense just to do the obvious thing, meaning that today, we’re going to talk about Iran and the United States. It’s the story of the moment.
Now, aside from David, who has some experience in the Middle East, I don’t know that we’d all claim to be Iran specialists or foreign policy gurus, but we are all interested in the ways that war and national security can intersect with politics at home. So, that’s what I hope we can get into today, how the confrontation between Israel and Iran and the United States has played out in Washington on the Hill within Trump’s MAGA coalition, which has experienced some stress over the president’s decision to get involved.
I should note we’re taping Wednesday afternoon, Day 2 of a cease-fire, so a lot of things might change by the time folks hear this on Friday. Things might change before we finish recording, but we’ll see. That’s not going to stop us.
Trump has said this should be called the 12-Day War, I think in all caps — always. JD Vance has been sort of playing down the notion that it’s a war, that we’re not in an ongoing conflict. How are we defining war at this moment?
French: I mean, by every measure of international law, this has been a war.
Bouie: Yes.
French: Now, is it a short war? Is it a war that has been interrupted maybe temporarily by a cease-fire? Those are valid questions, but come on — it’s a war.
Bouie: I don’t know how else you would describe it. JD Vance said we attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities, not Iran. It’s like that —
Lozada: Yeah, we’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.
Bouie: That doesn’t make any sense. f a foreign country, like Canada is fed up with all of our provocations and they struck at the U.S. Naval base at Norfolk, we wouldn’t say, oh, we’re not at war with Canada. We’re just responding to the fact that they attacked our naval base People would be like, what are you talking about? Attacking the sovereign soil of another country is an act of war. That’s just what it is by definition.
Lozada: Maybe Canada would say that it’s at war with the U.S. trade rep, but not with America overall.
French: The bottom line is these semantic games that we play in our politics just drive me nuts. War is a word with a meaning. By every historical standard, we just engaged in an act of war against Iran, whether it was short or long. Whether there are high casualties or minimal casualties doesn’t change the definition of the war. It is still a war.
Lozada: This reminds me of Vladimir Putin calling the invasion in Ukraine a special military operation, or the Obama administration rebranding the Global War on Terror as an overseas contingency operation — I think that was the term of art. There’s always this effort to call something other than what it is.
French: Truman called the Korean War a police action.
Bouie: That’s right — a U.N. police action. That’s what that war was.
French: Notable lack of involvement of actual police in this police action. It was a lot of B-29s and very few beat cops. But yeah, there have been a lot of euphemisms used over the years.
Lozada: So David, you’re a close follower of MAGA world. This is not a conflict that Trump inherited, but one that he entered willingly, just five months into this new administration. What do you make of that, given how often he’s campaigned against the warmongers and the globalists who drag America into foreign wars?
French: He did absolutely inherit the ongoing war between Israel and what we’ll call the Iranian axis, whether it’s Hezbollah in the north, Hamas, the Houthis, Iran itself. He inherited a Middle East that had been very transformed by a series of successful Israeli military attacks that had rendered Iran far more vulnerable than it had been in a generation. And I don’t think that that is an insignificant piece of this puzzle.
But then when he took the presidency, he took the presidency with a coalition that on this issue in particular was very divided. So you have a lot of people in what you might call normie Republican world who think of the Republican Party as absolutely committed to the defense of the modern state of Israel.
And then you have this whole other part that you’re going to call really MAGA. These are the people who came into the G.O.P. through Trump. There is a rising new right that is both antisemitic, very hostile to Israel and also much more isolationist. This is the America first people, and the only thing that united them was Donald Trump. And so you saw this fight play out very angrily online in the days before the bombing between the new right and what you might call normie Republicans. But then when the normie Republican view prevailed and there was an attack on Iran, at that point, you began to see how, once the big guy makes this call, Republicans overwhelmingly supported Trump. So there was a lot of division beforehand, but we always have to remember the fundamental organizing principle of the modern Republican Party is that Trump is right.
Lozada: One of the specific battles that’s come to the fore in recent days has been over war powers, and that’s been an issue on the Hill in particular. As a reminder, here’s what Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said earlier this week:
Audio clip of Mike Johnson: For 80 years, presidents of both parties have acted with the same commander in chief authority under Article II. You had President Biden use it three times in Middle East operations. President Obama went on an eight-month campaign bombing Libya to take down the regime there. I never heard a Democrat balk about any of that.
Lozada: And here’s what Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican of Kentucky, said on “Face the Nation” this week:
Audio clip of Thomas Massie: Congress was on vacation last week when all this was happening. Speaker —
Interviewer: You haven’t been briefed on any of the details.
Massie: We haven’t been briefed. They should have called us all back. And frankly, we should have debated this war powers resolution that Ro Khanna and I offered instead of staying on vacation and doing fund-raisers, and saying, oh, well, the president’s got this under control. We’re going to cede our constitutional authority.
Lozada: By the way, that quickly elicited a Truth Social post from Trump: “Get this bum out of office ASAP,” referring to Massie. So Jamelle, what is Congress’s role really supposed to be here?
Bouie: This is such a simple question, but there’s a lot of ways you can answer it — a lot of perspectives here. My own perspective is that decisions to go to war, decisions to use military force should first and foremost go through Congress. Especially in the case of something like the attack on Iran, where U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t saying that Iran was at an imminent threat of developing a nuclear weapon. There is time here to deliberate and there needs to be some kind of public discussion in public deliberation in Congress because the president is ultimately exercising the will of the broad public. And there needs to be some sense that the broad public has considered what’s about to happen and is either giving or its ascent or not.
Now, that’s what I think things ought to be. In practice how things are is that the president of the United States has broad authority to use military force kind of wherever and whenever the president sees fit. But even within that, there typically is — and there certainly ought to be some kind of congressional authorization of the force or some sort of legal basis for the president’s use of force. And in this particular case, I mean, what’s been interesting to me is that first, the administration — the president did not initially speak in ways that would suggest they’re leaning on an inherent power to use military force to deal with imminent threats.
They didn’t really even really speak in those terms, and there isn’t really any congressional authorization. I don’t know anyone who thinks a 2001 A.U.M.F. authorizes this.
Lozada: That’s the Authorization of the Use of Military Force after 9/11.
Bouie: That’s right. Which is specifically about giving the president the authority to use military force to respond to those responsible for the 9/11 attacks of which Iran is not part of that category of entities. There’s been a lot of talk of the War Powers Act, which presupposes that there’s some legal authorization, like lawful use of military force here.
So in that case, the president needs to let Congress know. And to restate what I said at the start, I’m of the view that yes, that’s at the very least what should happen and there needs to be some kind of legal authorization. It is actually against the very explicit intent of the U.S. constitutional order to allow presidents to use military force without any kind of regard for Congress.
Lozada: David, I’m sure this is something you’ve been thinking about.
French: Oh, don’t get me started, Carlos. I disagree with Representative Massie about many things. I agree with him about this; I think he’s completely correct. Look, if you go back and you look at the structure of Article I and Article II, it’s really not hard to lay out. The structure is: Article I, Congress declares war. Article II: the president commands the troops —
Bouie: Right.
David: — Once war is declared. So now there are obvious grays and complicators. You don’t have to wait for Congress to declare war if you’re under actual attack. You can shoot back and the president’s command authority locks in there. But if you’re going to do more than just shoot back, you have to go to Congress.
For example, after Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, our forces were fully engaged and fighting the Japanese in self-defense. But Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t just say, well, we’re at war, let’s go. He got a declaration of war.
Bouie: Can I add another example to that?
French: Sure.
Bouie: Because I think it’s a good one. The Civil War after Fort Sumter: President Lincoln calls up, requisitions troops and puts soldiers in the field. And then goes before Congress and basically says, listen, I had to defend the union. This is what I had to do. I need your authorization. I need your ascent to let me continue prosecuting this war.
French: After 9/11, George W. Bush went and got an authorization for use of military force. I mean, that is the way it is supposed to work, but it had been a bipartisan project — for a long time — of presidents deploying troops without proper congressional authorization.
A lot of people don’t realize this, but there was never a congressional vote for the Korean War. That was a big, big war, and we fought that without a congressional vote. So this has been going on for a while. In the 1970s, Congress decided to try and pair back presidential authority by reintroducing some constitutional rationality. And the way they tried to deal with the gray areas was to say, look, if we’re engaged in combat, or if we launch an offensive operation like was launched against Iran, you have to consult Congress within 48 hours. Congress then has 60 days to approve or not. If it does not approve of the military operation, you have 30 days to unwind it.
Presidents have said it’s not constitutional and have argued that it’s not constitutional for a long time, but I think it is absolutely constitutional. It should be deemed as absolutely binding. But the sad fact of the matter is — and Mike Johnson is articulating the view of a lot of members of Congress — they don’t want to do this. They do not want to exercise their constitutional authority, and that’s been the reality for generations now. And so I can fully support the idea of striking Iran, but it should be absolutely done in a constitutional manner.
Lozada: Let’s look at the Democrats for a moment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others have said that Trump taking America to war in this way is an impeachable offense. Now, if memory served me right, Trump has been impeached twice by the House and acquitted twice. On Tuesday, the House blocked efforts to impeach him again over these strikes. So not to worship at the altar of what’s savvy, smart or strategic politics, but is it wise for the Democrats to bring up impeachment once more in this context?
Bouie: The question of whether it’s wise — I don’t know about that. I think that if you take seriously, or write the claim that the attack on Iran was illegally done without congressional authorization, that it exceeds the power the president has, then yes, you would naturally want to introduce articles of impeachment. I think part of the political question here is that for your typical voter or typical American, they may not be able to distinguish what makes this different from any previous set of strikes called by any previous American president.
And so if we’re going to impeach Trump here, then why not introduce articles of impeachment for Obama and Libya? And so that’s why, as much as I obviously don’t like Donald Trump, I’m not certain that it is wise to introduce articles of impeachment around this particular thing, in part because impeachment being a political process depends on being able to sell to a public that something happened here that demands removal of the president. And for better or worse, I don’t think Americans understand this kind of use of military force as an impeachable offense.
Now, I will say that I do think Democrats ought to be much more comfortable criticizing Trump and criticizing any president about the use of military force. But then that also depends on Democratic members of Congress also taking their constitutional responsibility seriously. And you know, as David was saying earlier, Congress in general has abdicated these responsibilities, and that includes a lot of Democrats. Like A.O.C. might just be an outlier here. But many Democrats have been very reluctant to really ever question the use of military force.
French: This is such a fraught area because it is very easy to find members of Congress who will run to the war powers resolution when the opposing party engages in military action. It’s very hard to find members of Congress who’ve been outspokenly consistent on this issue.
And so what that does is it means that when you file articles of impeachment on an issue — when your own party has done the same thing — I would urge you not to. I would say there’s a good standard: If the president of my party did it and I didn’t file an article of impeachment when they did it, but then I am going to file it when the opposing party does it, you’re part of the cynicism with politics problem.
I think what the American body politic needs at this point is a reboot. It needs leadership to come in and say, even though I am president and even though the president has traditionally grabbed everything it could, I am running on a platform of restoring constitutional governance. And that means I’m going to go to office and I’m going to advocate for legislation that takes power away from me. When we find that person is when we’re going to have an opportunity for a reboot. Until we find that person, we’re trapped. Or until Congress grows a spine, we’re trapped in this moment. And this moment is embittering America and is yielding no lack of ammunition for the idea that politics is just a cynical exercise where my team can do no wrong and the other team can do no right.
Bouie: And also, the expansion of the president’s powers of war making — it ends up extending everywhere else for reasons that make total sense. If you are the president of the United States and you can just attack other countries without any real challenge from any other entities, courts will probably defer to you. Congress is going to defer to you. It’s not a big leap to go: If I can do this, why can’t I just change tax policy on my own? Why can’t I do these other things that are less consequential or less immediately consequential than war, on my own? It inculcates an attitude of: I should be able to do things unilaterally. Why do I need Congress to get behind me?
And this isn’t just speculation. Past presidents have basically said this. They’ve basically said: The thing about foreign affairs is it just gives you a looser hand. You’re not as tied to what Congress wants. This is both freeing and also somewhat embittering when it comes to limits on other authority you might have. And so you’re going to press up against those limits as much as possible and try to push past them. It distorts the entire constitutional system — it just does.
Lozada: I remember, in George H.W. Bush’s memoirs or the various books he wrote, he would often complain about precisely that. He felt so much more comfortable in foreign affairs in part because he had that freer hand.
One thing I’ve been wondering about is, in regards to the Democratic response to the Trump administration’s strikes on Iran, they’ve focused on the process questions — on the issue of war powers, on not getting proper authorization or consultation with Congress. They’ve done so a little bit at the expense of dealing with the substantive issue of whether they might agree with the need for the strikes. I feel that in some ways the process questions are a convenient cover to not have to engage on the substantive question as to whether this is something that is a good idea or not.
How do you guys see that kind of question on the Democratic side, on the real specifics of it? Is it a thing that they would want to see happen?
Bouie: I think you’re right to see the process questions as ways of avoiding the substantive question. I think that’s — for me, I do not think the strike in Iran was a good idea. And I think that the president’s tearing up of the Iran deal during his first term sort of set the conditions up for this. I see no evidence to think that the administration could manage the fallout from these attacks, which I think that’s being borne out as we speak. So for my part, my substantive critique is in line with my process critique that not only was this a bad idea to do, but it was a bad idea done in the wrong way.
I do sense that among Democratic officeholders, there is a real hesitance about making an argument either way, which I think speaks to a general lack of confidence about one’s ability to speak coherently and fluently on national security, as well as what is like real pressure amongst political elites to be supportive of these kinds of actions.
French: I’m going to absolutely defer to Jamelle on the internal assessments of the Democratic Party. But I would say this: Broadly, not many Americans are happy with the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon. I don’t think many Americans are happy with nuclear proliferation, broadly. So I do think that there’s this interesting moment we have where there’s a lot of feeling in America and the international community that Iran should not have a bomb. But there’s also very low trust with Donald Trump, that he’s the man to handle this.
I’m thinking of a David Frum piece in The Atlantic that’s just titled “Right Move. Wrong Team.” And that’s kind of how I feel as well. I feel like it’s the right move. Jamelle and I disagree about that, but I have real concerns that these are the people who have the wisdom and discernment necessary to actually pursue this intelligently.
Bouie: Not to make this a debate, but my kind of immediate question is, well, wouldn’t that just make it the wrong decision then? The decision part of whether what makes it the correct decision is precisely who is engaged in doing it.
Like, if I need to slice a cucumber, and need a sharp knife for that, it’s a good decision if my wife grabs a sharp knife and slices the cucumber. However much the cucumber may need to be sliced, I’m not going to let my 6-year-old do it. It would be a bad decision for me to let my 6-year-old slice the cucumber, irrespective of what needs to happen with the cucumber.
French: Yeah, well I think the problem is that if you say, well, we don’t need to do anything because I don’t trust these people, and Iran ends up with a bomb as a result of that, you have the bomb —
Bouie: Right.
French: You have the Iranian nuclear threat that you have when the prior team, as bad as it was, may have had an opportunity to stop it. So I think the quality of the team is much more relevant to the prospects of success. And if the prospects of success get to zero, then of course you don’t do it.
Bouie: Yeah.
French: But at the end of the day, I’m very, very alarmed by the downside risk of the Iranian nuclear bomb. And then that gets us, Jamelle, to a question that I don’t think any of the three of us are qualified to answer, which is: How imminent was that threat? Was this something that action had to be taken now, as Israeli intelligence seems to indicate, versus not? So there’s a lot we don’t know. But that’s why when push comes to shove, I’m going with right move, more than wrong team because of the profound threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Lozada: So Jamelle, it depends on how desperately you need that salad. [Laughter]
Bouie: Right. Yeah.
Lozada: Whether you end up cutting the cucumbers, you know, how hungry you are and how bad your diet has been that you have to really start consuming more salad.
I want to end on a question about foreign policy doctrines with a capital D. Daniel Drezner, who’s a political scientist at Tufts University has this joke that’s funny because it’s true, that all you need for a good foreign policy doctrine is a good adjective and a good noun. You can take any kind of foreign policy sounding adjective — like global, tactical, strategic, constructive — and any foreign policy sounding noun — engagement containment, projection, deterrence — and just combine them MadLib’s way and you get a great sounding foreign policy doctrine: “tactical deterrence” or “strategic reassurance.” Take your pick.
So with that caveat, I ask you, if “America first” has been the key principle or slogan that Trump has articulated so far to explain how he sees engagement in the world, have the events of recent days changed that? In other words, if you were to define a Trump doctrine based on what he’s done, not just what he said, what would it be now?
French: I think of the Trump doctrine in foreign policy the same as the Trump doctrine in domestic policy. Trumpism isn’t an ideology, it’s the ambition and will to power of one man. And so his doctrine is: What will help me? Even those elements where he has at least some degree of longstanding foreign policy or domestic policy, or a longstanding position — so very few politicians have loved tariffs as much as Trump has loved tariffs. Or very few politicians have loved immigration restrictions as much as Trump loves immigration restrictions. But when he perceives that his positions are harming his personal political prospects, he’ll take his foot off the gas. This is where that TACO comment comes from: “Trump Always Chickens Out.” It manifests as: I’m going to press the gas on tariffs, but then oops, this isn’t working out; I’m going to stop.
He’s been very pro-Israel in part because he has accurately seen that this is one thing that really draws the normie Republican base to him. But my goodness, didn’t he voice some real fury earlier this week at Israel when he thought Israel was going to violate the cease-fire. He was angry at both Israel and Iran when he was interviewed, where he said:
Audio clip of Donald Trump: We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the [expletive] they’re doing. Do you understand that?
So I think if Trumpism is just the will to power of one person — then the question becomes: “What’s in it for me?” And then in an interesting way, how Trump determines what’s in it for him is often based on the last person he talked to. So it’s one of the reasons why he goes back and forth constantly all the time.
Bouie: I would say that to the extent that there’s anything like a doctrine, anything you can use to consistently predict Trump’s actions on the foreign stage, it’s basically whether or not he can be aggressive without any pushback. He is a bully, right? He has the attitude and the mentality of a bully. As everyone knows, bullies don’t want people who are going to fight back.
And so if you can convince Donald Trump that you can take an action that has no blowback, no real consequences, no one’s going to push back, then he’ll do it. I think you’re seeing that here. That like, he wants this cease-fire so badly not because Donald Trump cares about peace in any meaningful sense, but because he doesn’t like the idea that there might be adverse consequences for his personal political standing.
French: There’s an interesting contrast with previous presidents, because both Obama and Bush in different ways made an investment in a particular kind of policy and sought to pursue that policy even when there was evidence of electoral blowback or pushback. There was evidence emerging as early as early 2009 that parts of Obamacare could result in some electoral blowback for Democrats but Democrats absolutely dug in and passed the Affordable Care Act.
Bush in 2006, after these disastrous midterms — which were in part related to the conduct of the Iraq War — didn’t start to pull out. He doubled down and did the surge because there was a belief or theory of the case in both of these political parties that they weren’t just designed for the sole purpose of electing human beings. They were designed for the purpose of advancing a particular set of policies.
The thing about Trump is he took the natural tendency of politicians to sort of do this thing — the apocryphal quote from a French revolutionary: “There go the people; I must follow them for I’m their leader.” That is an inherent temptation in politicians. But Trump has so little core — moral core, policy core, et cetera, that he is raised to an art form this idea that he is a person who is single-mindedly dedicated to his own advancement, versus a person who is dedicated to the advancement of an idea or even a nation.
It’s just an enduring irony to me that the Trumpists have tried to corner the term patriot. Now I think many of them are — I’m not casting aspersions in the patriotism of my Republican friends and neighbors. But they grab so closely and tightly to that word patriot, which implies selflessness in service of the country, and they pour it into devotion for a man who is more selfish than any national politician I’ve ever seen.
Lozada: I guess this comes down to how much being MAGA is really about principle and how much is about allegiance to, as David put it, the will to power of one person.
And it’s in moments like these — in decisions of life and death, of war and peace — that tension really comes to the fore. As far as the doctrine, for me, I’m not being completely glib with this. I think the Trump foreign policy doctrine is to win a Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump. When talking to White House reporters and people who cover him closely, this is something he’s obsessed with.
I guess the thinking is if Barack Obama can win an aspirational Nobel Peace Prize, maybe Donald Trump can do something that would win him the prize as well. And that would be the kind of cementing his legacy thing that he sees; for a leader who has all these populous pretensions, he’s quite fixated at times on these elite cultural markers.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Original music by Pat McCusker and Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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