“I’m very angry about this war,” said Gavin Newsom, the California Governor, on stage yesterday. Newsom has a memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, to plug, and a serious bid for the presidency in the offing. Like many other ambitious Democrats, he spies in Donald Trump’s new war an opportunity to cause grave damage to the Republicans in November’s midterms – and in the 2028 presidential election, too.
“Six Americans dead, including a young man from Sacramento,” he said, beating his chest in a nauseatingly theatrical manner. “You have a President who still cannot explain the rationale. Why now, and what’s the endgame?”
Operation Epic Fury, now into its sixth day, has united Democratic politicians in their condemnations of President Trump. At the same time, leading Democrats, such as Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his putative rival for the party’s presidential nomination in 2028, have taken care to emphasize that their objections to the war do not mean they support Tehran. Newsom insists he is “not naive” about the nature of the late Ali Khamenei’s leadership. “We know that the Iranian regime is brutal,” says AOC. “War is not the way we’re going to resolve that issue.”
New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich was more blunt. “I do think this begs for a moment of moral clarity,” he said. “And so yeah, the more clearly you say this seems like a really f**king stupid idea, I think the more people will appreciate what you’re getting at.” (Bad language is an effective way of cutting through the noise in modern politics.)
Congressional Democrats will push ahead with a “war powers” vote in an attempt to stress that a president must seek the authority of Congress before determining when and where America goes to war.
But the business of opposing the war is also likely to bring up tensions between the center and the left of the party over Israel, tensions which surfaced as the war in Gaza raged during the 2024 election. Kamala Harris fudged the issue, stating Israel’s right to defend itself while promising she supported the right to Palestinian self-determination.
But the mood of the party has since become ever more critical of the Israeli state, and potential Democratic challengers, while still cautious about frightening off Jewish voters and donors, are eagerly seeking to outdo each other by adopting positions that are critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On the Pod Save America podcast, Newsom even referred to Israel as an “apartheid state.” When asked if the US should reconsider its military support for Israel, he replied: “It breaks my heart, because the current leadership is walking us down that path where I don’t think you have a choice about that consideration.”
But while discussion of Israel will always be fraught in high Democratic circles, the war in Iran could give the party an opportunity to win back anti-war Democrats who drifted towards Trump in 2024. While Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has kept a low profile in recent days, leaders of his Make America Healthy Again movement have signed a petition for “Health, not War.”
In 2002, a young state senator called Barack Obama gave a powerful speech condemning the invasion of Iraq. “When I look out at this crowd today, I know there is no shortage of patriots or patriotism. What I do oppose is a dumb war,” he said.
The political landscape has changed a lot in the last 20 years, and Newsom is not as convincing an orator as Obama. But if Operation Epic Fury turns into Trump’s quagmire, and if its impact causes another surge in inflation, the Democrats will have been given an anti-war, pro-America platform from which they can regain power.
This article originally appeared in Freddy Gray’s Americano newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
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