The partisan messaging war over the DHS shutdown took a new twist this week in favor of Democrats, as I explained at New York.

Last month, Democrats refused to supply the votes to fund the Department of Homeland Security until the Trump administration and congressional Republicans agreed to place new guardrails on ICE and other immigration-enforcement agents. Since then, the GOP has tried to blame Democrats for the inevitable chaos. This has included airport delays, as unpaid TSA employees began to take days off, and jitters about FEMA not being prepared to handle natural disasters.

With Trump’s war of choice in Iran, there are fresh fears about threats to DHS’s core mission of defending the homeland against national security threats. Here’s a typical attack from the White House earlier this week:

“As Radical Left Democrats drag the Department of Homeland Security shutdown into its 24th day, everyday Americans are paying the price. Now, as TSA officers work without paychecks for the third time in nearly six months, crippling staffing shortages and hours-long security lines are gripping airports as millions of families head out for spring break …

“It’s not just airports reeling from the effects of the Democrat Shutdown. Democrats have cut off resources and funding for FEMA, the U.S. Coast Guard, and thousands of federal law enforcement officers — jeopardizing America’s border security, maritime safety, and ability to respond to emergencies.”

In the Senate, however, Democrats have managed to turn the tables. As they have repeatedly done, Republicans offered a bill to fund all of DHS, but Democrats this time around offered an amendment, as The Hill reports:

“Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, asked for unanimous consent for a measure to fund the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), U.S. Coast Guard and other agencies. It would not cover Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP).”

Predictably, Republicans blocked the Democratic amendment, but it served to mess up the GOP’s talking points. They could no longer claim Democrats wanted Americans to wait in long airport lines or risk exposure to natural disasters. Murray’s Republican counterpart on the Appropriations subcommittee responsible for the funding bill, Katie Britt of Alabama, retreated to a much older attack line that didn’t mention TSA, FEMA, the Coast Guard, or anything other than the masked agents Democrats have been seeking to get under control all along:

“We have political games being played by our Democratic colleagues instead of putting the people of this nation first,” Britt said. “Mr. President, what we’ve just seen put forth by the senator from Washington would effectively defund our law enforcement officers that are charged with keeping Americans safe.” Then Britt added, “Look, we’re not going back to the era of defund police. We’re not doing it.”

She further suggested that Democrats weren’t willing to negotiate over their immigration enforcement demands. But Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called b.s. on that charge.

“We are constantly in communication with the White House,” Schumer said. “It’s not that there’s a lack of means of communication. We’re sending things back and forth. It’s a substantive problem. The White House will not budge on things Americans want like warrants, like de-masking. Plain and simple.”

Instead of being vulnerable to the charge of holding DHS hostage to its demands regarding ICE, Democrats are arguing that it’s Republicans who are holding DHS hostage to its refusal to restrain ICE, despite abundant opportunities to secure funding for the rest of the department. Some Republicans might have hoped that Donald Trump’s decision to throw Kristi Noem under the bus would be enough to end the dispute. No such luck.

Some insights from “Killing Kids in Iran While Kids in the U.S. Go Hungry” by Sarah Lazare at The American Prospect and Workday Magazine:

“…On the first day of the war, the United States bombed an elementary school in Minab, in southern Iran, killing 168 people, 110 of them children. The U.S.-Israel coalition went on to heavily bomb residential areas in Iran and Lebanon, and strike oil depots around Tehran, filling the air with thick, black smoke that blots out the sun and unleashes oily, toxic rain…The Pentagon estimates that the war costs $1 billion a day, according to Atlantic journalist Nancy Youssef, who cites “a congressional official.” For that amount, the United States instead could be paying the daily cost of food stamps for the 41 million people who need them, or the daily costs of Medicaid for the 16 million people who are expected to lose their coverage due to recent cuts, according to Alliyah Lusuegro and Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project, an organization that researches federal budgets.

…Six in 10 people in the U.S. are against the airstrikes, according to a CNN pollreleased March 2. A whopping 82 percent of Democrats disapprove, found the poll, which mirrors the findings of another poll from Reuters/Ipsos. That survey determined just 7 percent of Democrats support the war, and just 27 percent of all adults…

Working-class Americans are already feeling the strain in their bank accounts. Since the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, gas prices have jumped 17 percent, an impact that—due to the realities of how our cities are designed—disproportionately harms working people. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has also blocked a significant chunk of the world’s fertilizer, which raises input costs for food producers and will almost certainly lead to higher food prices.

Food insecurity increased in 2025, climbing to 16 percent in November of that year, according to the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability at Purdue University. One in 7 households in the U.S. are “struggling to put food on the table,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research & Action Center, warned in February. “For the 47.9 million people, including 14.1 million children, who live in these households, food insecurity is not an abstract concept. It is a daily reality, and it has only gotten worse as the cost of food has continued to climb.”

Read more here.

The erratic changes of direction and outright flip-flops in the White House are a sign of GOP disarray, as I explained at New York:

The Trump White House is already trying to convince MAGA folk that an America First foreign policy means a war in distant Iran. And now it’s attempting an even bigger stretch: convincing voters that their heavily touted mass-deportation push is no such thing. Axios reports:

“White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair privately urged House Republicans on Tuesday to stop emphasizing ‘mass deportations’ and instead focus their messaging on removing violent criminals, according to sources in the closed-door briefing …

“Immigration enforcement has been a defining issue for Trump and congressional Republicans, and was a central pillar of their 2024 campaign message.

“The administration has leaned heavily into aggressive enforcement actions in its first year.”

That’s putting it mildly. But as Axios also notes, “mass deportation” in action polls poorly: “Nearly half — 49% — of Americans say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 voters who backed the president in 2024,” according to a Politico poll from January.

You might call this a bit of reverse engineering. During the 2024 campaign and the initial phases of the administration’s mass-deportation initiative, Team Trump created and promoted the impression that virtually all its targets would be hardened criminals. That has very visibly not been the case, since all sorts of peaceable legal immigrants, not to mention garden-variety domestic, health-care, and farm workers, have been brutalized by ICE — as have U.S. citizens and total bystanders. The victims of Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller haven’t been just the “worst of the worst” but also more sympathetic figures than their masked tormenters, all in all. So it’s rational (if not ethical) that Trump’s political advisers want to pursue the same policies under a modified slogan that seeks to take the “mass” out of “mass deportation.”

It’s theoretically possible that the administration will alter immigration-enforcement policies instead of simply rebranding them. But that could discourage the MAGA base.

If the administration changes what it’s doing, not just what it’s saying, you can perhaps add nativist ultras — even Stephen Miller himself — to the ranks of the 2024 Trump voters who feel the 47th president isn’t keeping his promises.

Some notes from “Pentagon probe points to U.S. missile hitting Iranian school” by NPR staffers Tom Bowman, Kat Lonsdorf and Geoff Brumfiel: “The U.S. has launched a formal investigation into a missile strike on an Iranian girls’ school that killed at least 165 civilians, many of them children, after a preliminary assessment determined the U.S. was at fault, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly. The investigation is expected to take months and will include interviews with all those involved, from planners and commanders to those who carried out the strike…If the U.S. role in the attack is confirmed, it would rank among the military’s most deadly incidents involving civilians in decades. Congress created a special Pentagon office to prevent the accidental targeting of civilians but it was dramatically scaled back by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth soon after he took office last year…As we have said, unlike the terrorist Iranian regime, the United States does not target civilians,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly…At a press conference shortly after the war began, Hegseth criticized “stupid rules of engagement,” and said such rules interfere with winning…NPR was the first news organization to report that the strike on the school appeared to be part of an attack involving precision weapons. Subsequent video of the strike released by Iranian state media gave visual indications that Tomahawk missiles struck a compound that included the school. Iranian state media also released pictures of Tomahawk missile components on a table in front of the school…NPR previously reported that the girls’ school was once part of what had been an Iranian Revolutionary Guard naval base and may have been shown on outdated U.S. target lists as a military building.” Arguments about who is most responsible for this tragedy will rage on. But President Jimmy Carter’s warning in his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize lecture resonates with increasing clarity: “We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen share their thoughts in “1 big thing: A consensus Bill of Rights” at Axios, and write: “In this morning’s “Behind the Curtain” column, we showed how algorithms and screens hide a more normal and agreeable American public. This actually extends to many hot political debates: Most people agree on most big topics most of the time. The results are striking — and should give you hope. See if this aligns with your experience…This notional Bill of Rights synthesizes majority views from polling of U.S. adults:…🗽 1. Government should have no say in what we say, how we pray, how we protest and whom we love, provided we act legally…79% of Americans say the government has gone too far in restricting the right to free speech. Strikingly, this view is held by 88% of Democrats and 86% of independents, showing it’s not just a right-wing grievance. (NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll, October)…A landmark poll of 20,338 adults by the Kettering Foundation/Gallup Democracy for All Project, published in November, found 84% believe America’s racial, religious and cultural diversity is a strength…2. Government should keep the border tight, and settle the status of those who’ve been here for years…A record-high 79% of U.S. adults consider immigration good for the country. (Gallup, June)…Two-thirds of registered voters say local officials should cooperate with federal immigration authorities on deporting illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. (Harvard CAPS/Harris, January)…But support for legal immigration hit an all-time high in the 23 years the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has asked the question (49%). And two-thirds of U.S. adults in the poll, out in October, support a path to citizenship for undocumented workers currently contributing to the economy…4. Government should stop spending money we don’t have, on things we can’t afford…90% of registered voters are concerned that the national debt’s effect on inflation is increasing the cost of living, according to a poll out two weeks agofrom the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which is dedicated to increasing awareness of fiscal threats…7. Government should start caring about American workers as much as it cares about the rich and powerful…37% of Americans say “big business” is a bigger threat to the country’s future than labor or government, tying the high in Gallup’s trend…” More here.

Interviewed by Jen Rubin at The Contrarian, Philip H. Gordon,  Sydney Stein, Jr. Scholar in the Foreign Policy program’s Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at Brookings, argues that “Let’s just start by acknowledging it is a terrible regime. It represses its people, it threatens its neighbors, it has sponsored terrors in the past, they did have a nuclear program. It would be a good thing if that regime were replaced…It would be great if we could replace that regime…The problem with that as a military mission, as you say, is that it’s just very unlikely to work. It’s never worked in the past, and we’ve tried this repeatedly. And we’ve tried it in different ways, with a full-on, you know, occupation invasion, like in Iraq, or just bombing, like in Libya. or arming the opposition in Syria, or international coalition in Afghanistan, there are all sorts of ways. But the problem is you remove the regime, however bad, and then you just create a political vacuum. And none of those formula we have tried has managed to put something stable in its place, and sometimes, like in Afghanistan, you go 20 years and you get the very guys that you threw out. In Iraq, you get a raging civil war…So, the problem is the impossibility of the mission, rather than the value of the mission, if we could do it. And Iran’s not going to be different, and that’s a mistake, you know, presidents have made repeatedly, but Trump seems to have made it, thinking, well, he’ll do it differently. Venezuela gave him a fantasy that you could knock out the regime. put in someone who would cooperate with you and everything would be fine. It’s very different, but what’s not different is that, in Iran, you have, as you mentioned, this hardened regime with thousands and thousands of armed men willing to kill and die for their cause, and you have a divided opposition that is unarmed, and so if you create chaos and quote-unquote knock out the regime, what is going to happen? probably not the moderate, friendly, pro-Western types that you’d like to come to power, but either, you know, all-out chaos, or the hard guys with guns.” More here.

A couple of salient insights from David Weigel’s “The Democratic tax fight that’s really over copying Republicans” at Semafor: ““One frustration with Democrats is that we have been working on and promising certain things, but we need to focus on how to actually deliver those things, more than how to deliver the message in a snappy, TikTok-friendly way,” he added…Democrats never explained how they lost the country between Trump’s two terms. (Bet on them never doing that.) But one popular theory is that the liberal groups over-sold the power of “deliveryism” — for example, that the Teamsters would appreciate the bailout of their pensions (nope) and college-educated voters would be thankful for student debt relief (hah)…An adjacent theory is that Trump promised more memorable, digestible benefits to voters than Democrats did, with “no tax on tips” as a case in point. Democrats are haunted by their failure to formalize a tax cut for tipped workers before Trump did, and they’ve studied how Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., ran far ahead of the presidential ticket after endorsing the Trump plan…The tax benefit for tipped workers made it into the GOP’s omnibus spending bill last year, and Democrats have been comfortable with their votes against it. But they don’t talk about repealing it, as James Carville recommended. For decades, they’ve run on keeping Republican tax cuts and reforms for lower-income people intact while raising taxes on the wealthy…A third new Democratic tax proposal this month, rolled out by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Ca., would “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share.” Nobody else would pay anything…Democrats who still believe in the New Deal-era promise of government helping the public are a bit depressed by the idea that the solution to their party’s problems is generating less money for that purpose…“This is just totally playing on Republicans’ turf,” said Adam Jentleson, a former senior Senate Democratic aide and the founder of the Searchlight Institute. Read more here.

Those who insist that the Republican Party does not support racism  and anti-semitism have some fancy ‘splainin’ to do. As Malcom Ferguson reports in “GOP House Nominee Has Bragged About His Copy of Mein Kampf—and More” at The New Republic: “On Thursday, Texas GOP Representative Tony Gonzales dropped his reelection bid in Texas’s 23rd district amid an ethics investigation into reports that he had an affair with one of his staffers who later killed herself. His primary opponent—and now de facto GOP nominee—is Brandon Herrera, who is going viral for being a Nazi apologist…Herrera, a right-wing, pro-gun YouTuber who goes by “The AK Guy,” has plenty of troubling red flags…On Friday, a recent podcast clip began circulating featuring Herrera joking about Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf…“That’s my copy at my house next to a bunch of the German stick grenades,” Herrera said, showing a co-host a picture on his phone. “I got the 1939 edition printed in English, just because I thought it was wild that you couldn’t buy it on Amazon, but you could buy The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.” Mein Kampf is very much available on Amazon, making Herrera’s lazy and ahistorical equivocation all the more troubling…In other past clips, Hererra has goose-stepped to a Nazi song, expressed affinity toward the white supremacist Dutch settlers who fought against locals and Communists in the Rhodesian Bush War, and referred to the Civil War as the “war of Northern aggression” while wearing a Confederate-flag shirt.”

From The Miami Times, Kevin Harris and Richard McDaniel report that “Trump’s affordability crisis is catching up to Republicans as Black and Brown voters shift.” Harris and McDaniel write, ” Donald Trump won 48% of Latino voters in 2024 – the best Republican showing in half a century. Fourteen months later, 70% disapprove of his performance as President. What changed? The price of groceries…Pew Research found 68% of Latinos say things are worse for them today than a year ago – the first time most Hispanics said this in nearly 20 years of surveys. Trump’s support among Hispanics has fallen to 28%, down 13 points since February, said The Economist/YouGov. And the U.S. Hispanic Business Council reports 42 percent of Latino business owners say things are worse for them under Trump… Black working-class voters face the same squeeze. Trump’s support with Black voters has fallen to just 10%, reports the New York Times. Among Blacks, high prices now poll higher than civil and voting rights concerns…When Black and Brown families can’t get ahead economically, social justice issues like civil rights and immigration tend to fall on their priority list. When rent hikes eat up raises or grocery bills climb 20% while pay stays flat, social issues become a luxury instead of a necessity… Democrats used this to their advantage in 2025 to reverse Trump’s gains with Black and Brown voters. In key races across Virginia and New Jersey, Democrats focused on high prices and showed pocket book messaging works strongly when it’s centered rather than mentioned as an add-on to social issues… Latino voters swung hard toward Democrats – backing Democratic governors by 37 and 34 point margins in New Jersey and Virginia. Kamala Harris only carried Latinos in these states by a razor-thin 3-point margin in 2024. Among Black voters, 89% voted for Democrats for governor in New Jersey and 86% in Virginia, while Harris carried Black voters by a much smaller margin at 68%, according to the Pew Research Center.” More here.

Justin Vassallo makes “The Case for a Radically Simple Democratic Agenda” at The Liberal Patriot: “Like my compatriots, I believe Democrats must develop clear policies that build economic democracy and strengthen existing laws meant to protect ordinary citizens from fraud and exploitation. Working families are not interested in piecemeal measures that do vanishingly little to increase their economic security and the prosperity of their communities, nor are they supportive of new wars for regime change overseas. I agree wholeheartedly, too, that the consequences of the cronyism this administration has indulged will not simply disappear with a changing of the guard. There will undoubtedly be many instances in which the next Democratic administration will have to restore administrative integrity, root out regulatory capture, and otherwise clean house…I’m not so confident, however, in the idea that Democrats, proverbial red marker in hand, must tally up every Trump offense and respond in-kind through an all-encompassing concept like Project 2029. Project 2029 is premised, in part, on reengaging voters who think Democrats have been timid about confronting the nation’s challenges. Democrats insist they want to flip red districts. Yet, while it may energize the party’s educated base, there are reasons to think Project 2029 is not suited to solving Democrats’ regional woes—that it will inevitably carry strong “culture war” connotations that do nothing to attenuate the pattern of fruitless political combat that has defined the better part of this century, in which no epochal majority coalition has been formed. Indeed, neither Project 2029 nor any of its equivalents is likely to fix the party’s image with working-class voters who associate Democrats with professional-class elitism and “woke” dogma.”

Vassallo continues: “To be clear, some of the ideas that could constitute Project 2029 are laudable and worth pursuing. Progressives committed to rebuilding shared prosperity and worker power are right to want to figure out how to do things better the next time around after the disjointed reforms and disheartening inefficiencies of the Biden years. The impetus to increase pressure on Democrats to show some spine, name the forces that have gamed the system, and stand up for Congress’s constitutional rights and duties correctly recognizes that Democrats have too often vacillated when given the chance to highlight the shallowness of Trump’s “populism.” To be effective, the core message in 2028 must be frank about the threats to the American dream and unflinching about what is needed to save it—not a banal promise to make life a little more affordable…Still, if Democrats are intent on truly reforming their party, shaking up the party system, and competing boldly in forbidding regions, they should try an experiment. Instead of drawing up a panoply of progressive wish lists dubbed Project 2029, Democrats should ask themselves: can they fit the heart of their agenda on a one-page memo without resorting to vague platitudes? Can they home in on a handful of pledges that would resonate from greater Boston to St. Louis to South Texas? Could they, in the case of projects that are for entirely appropriate reasons tailored to specific economic sectors or demographics, engender a spirit of reciprocity and mutual goodwill in the American people that depolarizes society? In short, can they sow belief that government can be a real instrument of economic progress and that revitalized communities will beget more?…Trump’s support may soon disintegrate, and his potential heirs may face dismal odds come 2028. Democrats, however, will remain at a disadvantage in too many parts of the country if they cannot, in plain, direct language, communicate a powerful vision to heighten the agency and aspirations of working Americans.” More here.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of major works of political analysis, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The Democrats are set for a good—perhaps very good—2026 election. They seem almost certain to take back the House and the Senate, while still improbable, is within reach. But once they stop congratulating themselves for taking advantage of thermostatic reaction against a floundering Trump presidency, they’ll face a fresh and more daunting challenge: who to nominate for their 2028 presidential candidate?

That nominee is crucial for two reasons. Most obviously, Democrats should want a candidate who will maximize their chances of taking back the presidency. Successfully sorting through the potential nominees to find that candidate is not a given. On a deeper level, parties typically rebrand themselves after a period of coalitional attrition through a presidential nominee who newly defines their image (think Clinton, Obama). The 2028 nominee should ideally provide that new template for the national party.

That’s the assignment. The Democratic presidential primary electorate will be the ones carrying it out (or not). At this point, what can we say about those voters and what they might be inclined to do? Clearly it’s early and any poll that attempts to survey that electorate cannot precisely predict what it will look like in 2028. That said, Third Way has just released a treasure trove of data (topline, memo, presentation, crosstabs) on these voters that illuminates the playing field aspiring Democratic candidates will have to negotiate. Here are some of the most interesting findings.

(1) The Democratic presidential primary electorate is dominated by women (61 percent), whites (65 percent), and non-college voters (60 percent). In addition, a clear majority (55 percent) are over the age of 55; just 12 percent are under 30.

(2) In terms of ideology, the Democratic primary electorate skews liberal to left as one would expect. The survey asks about ideology in two different ways:

• socialist/progressive/liberal/moderate/conservative
• very liberal/somewhat liberal/moderate/somewhat conservative/very conservative.

In the first categorization, socialist (6 percent) + progressive (11 percent) + liberal (43 percent) are 60 percent of the sample; in the second categorization very liberal and somewhat liberal are both around 31 percent making liberals 62 percent of primary voters when categorized in that way. Moderates in both categorizations are 34 percent of the sample while conservatives are a trace presence.

Naturally, liberals are to the left of moderates on most questions on the survey but this difference is attenuated if you use the first categorization, which subtracts out the socialists and progressives, who are very left, from the liberal category. Moderates are also relatively close to those who are somewhat liberal in the second categorization while those who say they are very liberal (which includes nearly all the socialists and progressives) are quite far to the left of both. Of course, one should remember that, in turn, moderates who vote in Democratic presidential primaries are quite far to the left of moderates in the overall electorate.

(3) Some common-sense ideas that candidates could include in their platforms generate almost unanimous support for candidates who back them. These include: “Building on the Affordable Care Act to cap health care costs for everyone, making it easier to choose your own doctor, stopping hospital price gouging, and streamlining medical bills” (96 percent overall support); “Providing more low-cost vocational training and apprenticeship opportunities, so people can get good-paying jobs in growing fields without a four-year college degree” (95 percent); “Investing in a range of energy sources, including clean energy, to meet our rising energy demand and bring down our bills” (95 percent)”; and “Overhaul ICE to focus only on dangerous criminals, not families who have lived in the U.S. for years and are contributing to their communities” (93 percent). Such proposals not only have overwhelming support within the Democratic primary electorate, they should also be salable to independents, swing voters, and some disaffected Republicans.

Read more…

Having lived through a lot of military conflicts that initially enjoy bipartisan support, I thought it was important to note at New York that Trump’s Iran War is different:

As expected, on March 4 the U.S. Senate rejected Tim Kaine’s War Powers Act resolution ordering Donald Trump to cease attacks on Iran within 30 days unless he gets congressional authorization. It was basically a party-line vote, with (as is often the case) Rand Paul voting with Democrats for the resolution and John Fetterman voting with Republicans to kill it. The vote was mostly symbolic anyway since the House counterpart resolution was on the road to failure, too, and Trump could veto any war-powers measure that arrived at his desk.

But what the Senate vote did establish is that Trump can conduct his war on Iran without interference from Congress indefinitely — or more specifically, until the Pentagon runs out of money to prosecute it. And once again, his party is fine with giving this supposedly peacemaking president a blank check, even though he’s done a wretched job of providing any coherent rationale for going to war, any consistent set of war aims, or any clear timetable for winding it all down. The branch of the federal government with the exclusive constitutional authority to declare war seems ready to stand aside.

If the war does drag on long enough to exhaust the vast new funding Congress gave the Pentagon last year, there’s already talk of giving it more. Senator Lindsey Graham, credited (or blamed, by some) for talking Trump into a regime-change war against Iran, made that clear this earlier this week, notes Politico:

“During closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill … senior intelligence and defense officials described a vast military operation that many members anticipate will require extra funding on top of the nearly $1 trillion Congress has already given the military over the last year.

“’I think there will be a supplemental coming,’ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters upon leaving his classified Senate briefing. ‘We’ll have to approve that.’”

Actually, they won’t “have to” approve additional funding. If the money runs out, suddenly Democrats will have some leverage over this war, just as they do over all spending that’s not provided for in a filibusterproof package like last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (which by all accounts isn’t happening again prior to the midterms and won’t happen at all if Democrats flip control of the House in November). And despite their tendency to write blank checks for this administration, cries for more money for the war in Iran could arouse questions from conservative fiscal hawks, as a separate Politico report observes:

“Passing any emergency funding will be a major fight on Capitol Hill, with Democrats already decrying the lack of details about how much the military is spending and Republican fiscal hawks wary of more spending. Reuters reported Tuesday that Deputy ‌Defense ⁠Secretary Steve Feinberg has been leading Pentagon work on a roughly $50 billion request.”

This does create a messaging problem for those Republican fiscal hawks who happily vote to let the president do whatever he wants with our country’s massive war machine but aren’t sure they want to pay for it. Just as importantly, a debate over war funding in Congress would provide a forum for Democratic questions about the purpose and duration of a conflict no one had reason to anticipate just a few weeks ago.

So for now, Republicans fully own this war, and share responsibility for the president’s decision to make it his top priority for the foreseeable future. It comes at the expense of other international obligations, and instead of any action on an “affordability agenda” his advisers and GOP lawmakers have been begging him to undertake ever since Democrats began winning off-year elections in 2025. Trump’s party better hope it all goes very well and ends very quickly.

From “CNN Data Guru Sees Warning Signs for GOP After ‘Dumpster Fire’” by Julia Owned at The Daily Beast:

CNN’s data guru said the closely watched primaries in Texas yielded a “tremendous” turnout for one party and a “dumpster fire” for another.

Harry Enten said 2.3 million Democratic voters in Texas came out for the hotly contested Senate primary between State Rep. James Talarico and House Rep. Jasmine Crockett, marking the highest-ever turnout at more than twice the average this century, with only 92 percent of the estimated vote in so far.

At New York, I offered some thoughts about the opportunity costs (and for Democrats, opportunities!) of Trump pursuing a war of choice in an election year:

Donald Trump’s “war of choice” against Iran is a big departure from his administration’s alleged determination to focus on improving the domestic economy and addressing concerns about affordability before crucial midterm elections this November. But aside from the president’s spectacular failure to stay on message, there is a more specific problem with the sudden lurch into a regional war in the Middle East. To the extent Trump had an actual affordability agenda (other than calling concerns about living costs “a hoax”), a central pillar was keeping energy prices low by demolishing any obstacles to maximum exploitation of fossil-fuel resources. Aside from the beneficial effect this might have on prices for other goods and services influenced by energy costs, the “drill baby drill” mentality was designed to reduce gasoline pump prices, one of the most visible inflation indicators from the perspective of regular folks.

Suddenly, the United States has produced an energy-price crisis for itself and for the whole world, Reuters reports:

“Traffic through the Strait ​of Hormuz was closed for a fourth day after Iran attacked five ships, choking off a key artery accounting for about 20% of global oil and LNG supply. …

“The conflict risks triggering a renewed spike in inflation that could choke off economic recovery in Europe and Asia if the war is prolonged in a region that accounts for just under a third of global ​oil production and almost a fifth of natural gas.

“Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer, on Tuesday said it may be forced to cut production by more than three million barrels per day ​in a few days if oil tankers cannot move freely to loading points, according to two Iraqi oil officials.”

While other countries face the most dire immediate economic consequences from a war that Trump is now projecting to last a month or more (“whatever it takes,” to be precise), it’s about to affect Americans too:

“American motorists could soon pay more at the pump amid spiking oil prices due to the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran, with experts predicting gasoline prices could rise sharply this week.

“The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, a type of oil primarily produced in the U.S., jumped 6.2% on Monday to $71.19 per barrel, according to data from FactSet. Brent crude, the international benchmark, surged nearly 9% to $79.31 per barrel on Monday, its highest point in more than a year.

“Gas prices in the U.S. could start moving higher as soon as Monday, according to GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan, who predicted that some gas stations could be charging as much as 30 cents more per gallon by the end of the week.”

And the indirect effects could be even more severe, as Canadian energy expert Rory Johnston told our own Benjamin Hart:

“I think if this lasts a couple more days, we’ll see it reflected at the gas pump in terms of overall gas prices. Diesel will be even more acutely affected. I think the big impact will be on freight and shipping rates, and that’s going to hit consumers more on the price of produce, the price of random consumer goods. That’s the type of stuff that diesel will complicate more. So I think you will see an impact at the price of the pumps, but the biggest impact won’t be as visible to consumers immediately. It will take a while to work through the supply chain.”

As part of their furious spin about a war that’s already unpopular outside Trump’s Republican base, administration gabbers are arguing that Trump’s expansion of fossil-fuel production is giving him the strategic flexibility to wreck global oil markets without catastrophic consequences, notes the New York Times:

“The Trump administration has said that it has more leeway to act aggressively in the Middle East because the world is flush with oil and gas, thanks in part to record U.S. production, and has less to fear than it once did from energy price shocks.

“The ongoing war in Iran could put that theory to the test.”

While it may be comforting to Americans to be told they won’t be paying as much for this war as they might have had Trump not impatiently brushed aside environmental fears about fossil fuels, it doesn’t explain the decision to subordinate economic policy to another presidential military adventure. Yes, MAGA true believers are buying Trump’s claim that Iran’s nuclear-weapon and missile programs posed an immediate threat to the United States, but other Americans aren’t at the moment. So his decision go in this radical direction sure looks like a conscious choice to subordinate the daily concerns of his own people to a globalist agenda and an alliance with Israel that already troubles a majority of Americans.

Even as Republicans cheer this war, Democrats have an obligation to discuss the agenda being blown up by the explosions in Iran.