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Opinion
While Distancing from AIPAC, Most 2028 Democratic Hopefuls Are Still Embracing Israel
The bulk of the Democrats mapping a path to the White House for 2028 are dodging profound questions about human rights and US policy toward Israel.
Apr 06, 2026
After decades of bipartisan deference to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the likely contenders for the next Democratic presidential nomination have been distancing themselves from the powerful organization. The shift is significant. But disavowing AIPAC has become a box-checking exercise, useful for politicians who remain firm supporters of Israel.
Polling last month found that registered Democrats—by a margin of 67-17 percent—were more sympathetic toward Palestinians than Israelis. For elected officials on automatic pilot for Israel, such numbers are a big jolt. In response, the evident quest is to satisfy the majority of Democratic voters who have negative views of Israel, while at the same time not angering its supporters.
While AIPAC and perhaps other pro-Israel groups must now cope with being shunned by many Democratic politicians, the implications for US policy toward Israel are another matter. The Times of Israel reports that “none of the potential 2028 Democratic Party candidates has embraced AIPAC,” but the ultimate goal of such organizations is to prevent federal officeholders from impeding the massive pipeline of American weapons to Israel or fracturing the US-Israel military alliance.
“It’s not just avoiding AIPAC money,” Congressman Ro Khanna told me. “It’s the guts to take them on with clear policy.” Khanna has stressed that “what matters more is the clarity of calling what happened a genocide and stopping military sales to Israel used to kill civilians in Gaza and Lebanon.”
As vocal opponents of US arms shipments to Israel, Khanna and Senator Chris Van Hollen are unusual in the field of expected Democratic presidential candidates. That’s why the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, singled them out for denunciation last month at the ADL’s national conference, complete with the timeworn technique of insinuating antisemitism.
In sharp contrast to confronting the immorality of arming Israel’s genocidal policies, simply promising not to take AIPAC money is easy. As if to show how valueless such a pledge can be, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear stuck like glue to standard pro-Israel talking points during a national interview this spring. Along the way, he refused to call what Israel has done in Gaza “genocide,” complaining “that’s becoming one of those new litmus tests that we said we would never do as a party again.”
(Khanna replied with a pointed tweet saying: “Yes, standing up for human rights is the most basic litmus test. Our party needs a new moral direction.”)
The governor getting the most attention for 2028, California’s Gavin Newsom, has offered assurances that he will never take AIPAC money. In an early March interview, he seemed to compare Israel to an “apartheid state”—but later emphatically backtracked, expressing regret over using the word “apartheid” and declaring: “I revere the state of Israel. I’m proud to support the state of Israel.” That expression of reverence came more than three weeks after Israel had initiated its current wars on Iran and Lebanon.
Another governor eyeing the Oval Office who has vowed not to take AIPAC funding is Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. He became controversial during the intense carnage of the Israeli war on Gaza when he called for a crackdown on peaceful campus protests.
Others with long pro-Israel records who are often named as potential 2028 candidates have maintained tactful silences when asked about whether they’d accept support from AIPAC, including Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock, Governors Wes Moore of Maryland and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
This spring began with a round of high-profile interviews with Senator Cory Booker as apparent groundwork for a presidential campaign. Booker was still receiving donations bundled by AIPAC at the end of 2025, but he cut off funding from the group this year. “I don’t believe we should be accepting any PAC money at all from anybody,” Booker said. He has a long history of courting AIPAC.
Now New Jersey’s senior senator, Booker “frequently ingratiated himself at the AIPAC conferences by professing his unquestioned loyalty to Israel,” the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs noted three years ago. “For example, on March 2, 2020, Booker, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reassured the AIPAC throng of the ‘unshakeable bond’ between the United States and Israel, an ‘indispensable ally’ that the United States would continue to ‘fully support ensuring that they have the means and resources’ that Washington annually provides.”
Routinely, those who’ve backed away from AIPAC sound notes of partisanship rather than morality. Another prominent Democrat likely to make a run for president, Illinois governor JB Pritzker, attributes his alienation from AIPAC not to its resolute backing of an apartheid state and its deadly treatment of Palestinians along with others in the region, but instead to its alignment with the GOP. “It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump,” Pritzker explained to the Associated Press in March. “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”
As Axios pointed out, “Pritzker has tried to walk a fine line – breaking with AIPAC over its affiliation with Trump rather than Israeli actions.” A spokesperson for Pritzker underscored the point, saying that he broke away from AIPAC when it “became a pro-Trump organization.”
Changes in the direction of windsocks show how the political winds are blowing, and there’s no reason to believe that the change in views of Israel among the Democratic electorate is merely temporary. But scrutiny should be applied to how top Democrats are framing their disenchantment with the Israel lobby without challenging the alliance between the US and Israel or decrying the colossal damage it has been doing to human lives.
Four of the senators now reportedly serious about a 2028 presidential run – Booker, Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly and Raphael Warnock – voted to support sending $8.8 billion worth of weapons to Israel last year. They now say they’ll reject AIPAC money, without any sign of interest in voting to block such shipments in the future.
While distancing from AIPAC, the bulk of the Democrats mapping a path to the White House are dodging profound questions about human rights and US policy toward Israel. A favorite technique is to blame Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than Israel, as though they can be separated after he has been in power for more than 15 of the last 17 years.
And so it was when former Chicago mayor and longtime corporate-Democrat power broker Rahm Emanuel declared in late March that he and AIPAC had nothing to do with each other: “I worked for a two-state solution in my whole public life as adviser to President Clinton, as a congressman and as President Obama’s chief of staff…. I have a long fraught and publicly known antagonistic relationship with Prime Minister Netanyahu for his hostility and attempts to undermine that goal.”
Notably absent from media coverage of the recent public splits between AIPAC and Democratic politicians has been any mention of kindred organizations like Democratic Majority for Israel, a virtual spinoff from AIPAC which has worked in parallel to swing elections ever since its founding in 2019. “The new group says it’s independent and distinct from AIPAC,” the Forward newspaper reported at the time—but out of DMFI’s 15 board members, 11 “have either worked or volunteered for [AIPAC], donated to it or spoken at its events.”
During the last seven years, DMFI has wielded electoral power in its own right while targeting key races. The group spent $6.2 million in the latest election cycle, deftly intervening in races (without mentioning Israel in attack ads) to defeat candidates deemed too critical of Israel and overly sympathetic to the rights of Palestinians.
From the outset, DMFI received a political benediction that reflects how fully Israel-right-or-wrong politics saturate the fabric of Democratic Party leadership. “I look forward to working with the Democratic Majority for Israel as it advances the unbreakable US-Israel bond into the future,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, now the Democratic leader in the House.
Despite all of its awesome clout in American politics, AIPAC has been more a symptom than a cause of what ails US policy in the Middle East. “The unbreakable US-Israel bond” continues to take a horrific toll as the US-Israel military alliance rampages through the region. Among leaders in Washington, much deeper changes will be needed than giving up money from AIPAC.
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The Political Opportunity of a Lifetime—Don't Blow It
Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.
Apr 06, 2026
The 2026 and 2028 elections can and should be the beginning of something transformational.
We’ve got tailwinds like you wouldn’t believe. A president whose approval rating has dropped below 35%, rivaling Nixon during Watergate. The man said, on camera, at an Easter lunch at the White House, that we can’t afford daycare because “we’re fighting wars.” That same week he asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion military budget. A 44% increase. The largest in American history.
The same guy who wants $152 million to reopen Alcatraz as a prison while we’re spending roughly $2 billion a day bombing Iran in a war nobody asked for, a war that’s woefully unpopular even with the MAGA base.
But daycare? Too expensive, folks. Can’t swing it. Trump really doesn’t give a f…
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Fox host turned Secretary of War, is out there at the podium in the Pentagon asking Americans to pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, for “overwhelming violence” against Iran. The Pope rightly sees it differently, calling the war immoral.
Oh, and let’s not forget that these people aren’t just inept, they’re largely insane, like the dude running FEMA who’s been on podcasts claiming he was teleported to a Waffle House.
So, we’ve got a historic opportunity staring us in the face. But here’s the sad part. The really upsetting part.
The question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick.
Even in the face of all this, our party is still less popular. Even amongst ourselves. 55% of us say the party has the wrong priorities. 71% of Democratic-aligned voters say the party’s been ineffective at opposing Republican policies. Why? Because it has been. This isn’t a messaging problem. This isn’t voters failing to appreciate how good the Democratic Party is. This is us finally starting to understand how bad it is. How far our party has drifted from the people it claims to represent. How captured it’s become by Wall Street, big pharma, big tech, big oil, the military industrial complex, and every other industry that’s learned to write checks to both sides and win no matter who’s in power. Our leadership has failed us. We see it. We know it.
Last Saturday, 8 million of us were in the streets. All 50 states. More than 3,300 events. The largest single-day demonstration in American history. Nearly half of those events were in red states and rural communities. People who never march for anything marched.
But we marched against stuff, not for stuff. Against Trump. Against kings. Against war. There’s this energy out there and it’s real and it’s righteous, but right now it’s anger without a goal, and anger without a goal can’t build power. A goal, a vision, hope, that’s what you build a supermajority around. Our party is really good at channeling anger into “Trump bad” but that won’t do it. These millions of us, not just the 8 million in the streets but the tens of millions more who weren’t, could be a burning light hot enough to set this country’s rot ablaze if a party would just hold the magnifying glass.
But you’ve got to understand how we got here.
Trump’s first election was a warning sign so loud that half the country covered its ears. Then Covid hit and nearly buckled a healthcare system already on life support. We lost jobs, lost coverage, lost family members, and discovered that basically every system we’d been told to trust, healthcare, housing, childcare, the supply chain, was one crisis away from collapse. Then we elected Biden, who passed trillions in spending bills. For a moment it felt like something was changing.
It wasn’t. The systems that caused this mess stayed intact.
We need to accept that America doesn’t just have a spending problem. We have a system problem. Every time Democrats get into power they pump money into broken systems without rebuilding them. Obama did it. Biden did it. The money goes in and disappears, absorbed by corporate middlemen, diluted by bureaucracy, leaving barely a trace in the lives of the people who needed it most.
And then we get Trump again. Twice elected.
If that doesn’t convince you that Americans are screaming for transformation I don’t know what will. People aren’t electing Donald Trump because they love Donald Trump. They’re electing him because they’re done with the status quo. They’re done being told our system is functional when they can see with their own eyes that it isn’t. They want it burned down. That’s a rational response to decades of betrayal. It’s also a catastrophic one. But it’s what happens when nobody offers an alternative vision. In the absence of hope and vision anger will do.
That is what so many elected Democrats lack, a vision. A mission. The folks running this party have failed and they have names. Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Gregory Meeks, Pete Aguilar, Amy Klobuchar, Ted Lieu. Those are the names of the leaders that 55% of Democrats think are failing.
We’ve been so afraid of words like socialism that we’ve allowed these folks to contort our values into shapes that are almost unrecognizable.
Here’s the dark irony. MAGA isn’t calling out corruption. They are the corruption. But they’re willing to tear down institutions that too many treat as sacred. The DOJ, the SEC, the FDA, the courts, it doesn’t matter. They’ll dismantle anything. They’re doing it for greed and power and not a damn thing for the American people, but the lesson is still there. No institution should be untouchable. The revolving door between corporate boardrooms and government shouldn’t just be stopped, the people who came in through it need to be removed. We should’ve been saying that for years. Some of us were. Nobody in leadership heeded the call.
But some of us are done waiting for leadership to listen.
Saikat Chakrabarti built Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited and elected AOC by unseating a ten-term incumbent the Democratic establishment said was untouchable. He was her chief of staff. He wrote the Green New Deal. He took on the most powerful people in the party and won. He’s running for Congress again. Graham Platner is publicly calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside. He’s not just running his own race. He’s campaigning alongside Chakrabarti, alongside Abdul El-Sayed, alongside a growing list of candidates who are building a coalition before they even get to Washington. They’re rallying together, organizing together, building something real together. This isn’t hypothetical. It’s already underway.
These candidates are calling out corporate PAC money, calling out AIPAC, calling out the Iran war, calling out our own party’s leadership on the things that actually matter. They’re proving you can run without selling out before you even start.
But they’re not just running against the establishment. They’re running to stop the next great extraction. AI is going to do to the top 20% what offshoring and NAFTA did to factory workers. The project manager. The paralegal. The coder. The analyst. Same story, faster timeline. It doesn’t have to go that way. But the only path that doesn’t end there runs straight through public ownership. A share of the economy for every American. Because the more automated production becomes, whether it’s software or automobiles or medicine, the more important it is that it gets built here and that we own a piece of what it produces. The alternative is the Rust Belt, but for everyone.
We’re roughly 30% of the electorate. Independents who support healthcare, housing, a government that actually builds things, those people are with us in enormous numbers. What they don’t agree with is our leadership. What they don’t trust is our track record. What they’re waiting for is someone to actually mean what they say.
So the question is whether we’re going to back these people or keep doing what we’ve always done. Listening to party leaders and pundits and establishment political hacks tell us who to pick. Letting them convince us with their metrics and their models that we’re better off than we think we are. Letting them talk us out of believing our own eyes. They’ve been doing it for decades and we’ve been letting them and the results are sitting right in front of us.
This party belongs to us. Not to its donors. Not to its consultants. Not to its leadership. It’s time to squeeze it back toward our values and away from the people who’ve been writing the checks. We’ve got to be brave enough to back the people willing to break the cycle. With money. With hours. With our voices and our votes in primaries that most people ignore.
Moments like this don’t come around often. The candidates are there. The coalition is forming. Don’t let this one pass.
Let’s back the fighters.
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Cheap Drones and the Iran War Blowback Threat
You do not have to be a cynic to predict that Trump would relish such mayhem.
Apr 06, 2026
While our intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have long studied possible “domestic blowback scenarios” to our aggressive wars overseas, what happened last month was a troubling, unexplained reality. ABC News reported that the large Barksdale Air Force Base (BAFB) in Louisiana, where B-52 bombers are stationed, “detected multiple unauthorized drones operating in our airspace during the week of March 9th, quoting Capt. Hunter Rininger of the 2nd Bomb Wing. These drone flights continued for nearly a week.
More specifically, according to what ABC News described as a confidential Air Force briefing document dated March 15, 2026, “the drones came in waves and entered and exited the base in a way that may suggest attempts to ‘avoid the operator(s) being located.’ Lights on the drones suggested the operators ‘may be testing security response’ at the base.”
“Between March 9-15, 2026, BAFB Security Forces observed multiple waves of 12-15 drones operating over sensitive areas of the installation, including the flight line, with aircraft displaying non-commercial signal characteristics, long-range control links and resistance to jamming,” the document added.
These flights lasted around four hours each day. The confidential document obtained by ABC News considered these “incursions” to be criminal offenses under federal law, calling them “a significant threat to public safety and national security since they require the flight line to be shut down while also putting manned aircrafts already inflight in the area of risk.”
Well, Mr. Trump, even your MAGA loyalists may be wondering why your “Department of War” did not intercept these drones, bring them down, and learn whose sending them. One would also think, this would be a huge newsworthiness episode for the mainstream mass media. The American people were left with a vague assurance that the Air Force’s investigation was being assisted by the Louisiana State Police.
Since then, there has largely been silence, from the media, from Congress, and from the war-mongering Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, who would be expected to overcome this unauthorized “unmanned aerial system.”
This is the kind of provocative event that generates conspiracy theories.
There is a larger puzzle here, given how much the Pentagon is given by Congress to spend on defense – over 50 percent of the entire federal government’s operating expenditures. Ellen Mitchell, writing in The Hill newspaper on March 7, 2026, gives us an expert’s assessment: “Brett Velicovich, a former Army intelligence special operations soldier who has worked with Ukraine’s drone forces in its defense against Russia, said he and other drone experts have been warning the US to prepare for drone warfare for years.” He added, “Our counter drone systems need work.”
Small Ukraine is ahead of the US in developing low-cost drones and drone interceptors, while the US builds $13 billion aircraft carriers, which in modern missile warfare would become sitting ducks.
The US military is presently experiencing Iran’s response to Trump’s February 28th treacherous attack, in the middle of negotiations no less, of their advanced, inexpensive Shahed drones, which can be assembled in a garage.
Those garages assembling drones could soon be in the US, which now are included in the blowback assessments noted earlier by US intelligence agencies. The more the US Empire blows up people abroad in countries that pose no threat to the US, the more the grieving survivors may be motivated to retaliate. Certainly, if the shoe were on the other foot and some giant military powers were obliterating US civilians and civilian infrastructure, does anyone doubt there would be vengeful retaliation?
Iran has the added grievances of having their elected prime minister overthrown by the CIA in 1953, followed by the US-installed dictator Shah for 25 years. Then, following the Iranian overthrow of the Shah in 1979, the US backed Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, to invade Iran, causing about 500,000 Iranian fatalities in this multi-year aggression. Since then, the US and Israel have been sabotaging Iran, annihilating its leaders, and imposing crushing economic sanctions on that country (twice the size of Texas) of 93 million people.
Is it a surprise that the militarily surrounded and massively infiltrated by Israeli spies Iranian theocratic regime imposes very harsh measures internally? By comparison, without any external threat, Tyrant Trump has imposed police state measures in our country, illegally seizing and imprisoning innocent people by the thousands, and causing casualties among United States citizens.
It is evident from warnings by specialists that the US is unprepared for ‘lone wolf’ drone attacks, much less more organized drone retaliations.
You do not have to be a cynic to predict that Trump would relish such mayhem, which he would immediately exploit to bolster his failing dictatorial regime and dropping poll numbers. Dictators know exactly how to brutally suppress dissent and consolidate their domination with exaggerated rhetoric to pursue massive violent revenge. Trump, in his lie-filled and violent televised diatribe to the nation on Wednesday, told the Iranian people that “We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We’re going to bring them back to the Stone Age, where they belong.” That is the grisly playbook that dictators have launched for generations to cover their own crimes of death and destruction.
The American people had better be alert to this predictable reaction by the dangerous Trump. His more extremist supporters, including some convicted violent criminals who he has pardoned, may not wait and are capable of trying to pull off a “false flag” operation to provoke worse impacts from Trumpian fascism.
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This Is Not Just a War on Iran. It Is a War on American Democracy.
Trump's military gamble in the Middle East isn't just reckless foreign policy. It could be the opening move in the end of American democracy as we know it.
Apr 06, 2026
When Donald Trump ordered military action against Iran, the response from much of the political commentariat followed a familiar script. Reckless, they said. Destabilizing. A dangerous distraction from domestic failures. A president lashing out. All of these characterizations may be true. But they miss what may be the far more consequential story, one that connects the bombs falling on Tehran to a calculated, if desperate, effort to make democratic accountability in the United States structurally impossible.
This is not hyperbole. This is what the evidence, taken together, begins to suggest.
To understand why, we need to step back from the fog of the immediate crisis and ask a harder question: what does Donald Trump actually need right now? Not rhetorically. Not ideologically. Politically and structurally, what does a president with cratering poll numbers, a midterm catastrophe on the horizon, and a plutocratic agenda that depends entirely on his continued hold on power actually require to survive?
The answer, it turns out, looks a great deal like what we are watching unfold.
Buying the One Constituency That Could Stop Him
Trump's political coalition has always rested on an unusual alliance. Fossil fuel companies were early and enthusiastic backers. Big Tech, or at least significant factions of it, increasingly joined the fold, drawn by promises of deregulation and the intoxicating proximity to state power that Silicon Valley's more authoritarian-curious wing has found so appealing and profitable. These were the interests Trump understood, catered to, and rewarded.
The military-industrial complex, once ambivalent about Trump, now has enormous skin in the game.
But one pillar of American elite power remained conspicuously cool to the whole enterprise: the military-industrial complex. This was, in part, by design. Trump ran as the anti-war candidate, the scourge of "forever wars," the prophet of "America First," the man who would bring the troops home and stop pouring national treasure into conflicts that enriched Beltway contractors while delivering nothing to the working-class communities that voted for him. It was a potent message. It was also, we now know, a temporary one.
Consider what has happened in just the past week. Trump's proposed $1.5 trillion defence budget for fiscal year 2027 represents the largest military spending request in modern American history, a 44 percent increase over the previous year. As the Washington Post reports, this would be the biggest Pentagon budget in US history. Economists at Fortune describe it as rivaling the wartime mobilization of World War II. Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke put it bluntly: "MAGA was told an untruth by Trump. No foreign wars, no adventurism… This is a massive militarization—completely the opposite of what he told his base."
This is not a defense policy. It is a transaction.
And how is this historic spending increase being paid for? By gutting Medicaid, food assistance, housing programs, climate research, K-12 education, and virtually every program that materially supports the lives of the people who voted for Trump. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates this expansion of the military budget will add more than $3.2 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. The president himself acknowledged his priorities plainly at an Easter luncheon this week for Christian religious leaders and Cabinet members: "We can't take care of daycare. We're a big country. We have 50 states. We're fighting wars."
This is not a defense policy. It is a transaction. It is the most expensive political consolidation in American history, aimed squarely at drawing the defense industry and the Pentagon into the corporate bloc that sustains this administration. The Iran war, whatever its strategic rationale, serves that consolidation perfectly. Wars need weapons. Weapons need contracts. Contracts need contractors. The military-industrial complex, once ambivalent about Trump, now has enormous skin in the game.
But there is a second and more chilling dimension to this realignment. The military is not just an economic constituency. It is, historically, the institution most capable of checking an executive that moves to seize unconstitutional power. Trump appears to understand this. Over two days last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George, Army General David Hodne, and the chief of chaplains Major General William Green, all with immediate effect. George had been expected to serve until the summer of 2027. According to Axios, a US official described firing the Army's most senior general in the middle of a war as "insane." The general replacing George, Christopher LaNeve, was previously a personal aide to Hegseth himself.
It is... worth considering the possibility that removing independent-minded commanders serves purposes that go well beyond the prosecution of the current war.
These firings did not come from nowhere. Hegseth has now removed more than a dozen senior military leaders across multiple branches since taking office, including Joint Chiefs Chairman General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the Navy's top admiral, and the head of the Coast Guard. The pattern is unmistakable: experienced, independent commanders are being replaced by loyalists. This is not about military effectiveness. It is about ensuring that when the moment comes, the armed forces are led by people whose careers depend entirely on the man in the White House.
Senator Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, offered his assessment on Friday: "It's likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly." That interpretation deserves to be taken seriously. Yet it is also worth considering the possibility that removing independent-minded commanders serves purposes that go well beyond the prosecution of the current war.
The Contradiction That Cannot Be Resolved
To understand why a broader power consolidation may be coming sooner than most people think, you have to understand the structural trap that Trumpism has always been caught in, a trap that is now visibly closing in around the administration and threatening its political survival.
Trump won his second term, as he won his first, by weaponizing legitimate grievances. The slow strangulation of working-class communities. Decades of wage stagnation. The punishing weight of rising costs in housing, healthcare, and food. He named these things loudly and unapologetically, when much of the Democratic establishment was still insisting that the fundamentals were sound. That naming had real political power. It brought him the votes of people who had seen their lives get harder through multiple administrations of both parties and had concluded that someone willing to say the unsayable was better than another round of managed decline.
It also created a structural problem that no amount of political talent can solve: the conditions Trump identified are not the product of bad leadership or globalist betrayal. They are the inevitable result of capitalism, specifically of four decades of neoliberal restructuring that concentrated wealth, hollowed out labor protections, financialized the economy, and made the cost of living an ever-growing crisis for the majority of Americans. Trump had neither the intention nor the ideological framework to change any of this. His economic program, built on tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation for corporations, and tariffs that function as a consumption tax on working people, does not address the underlying crisis. It accelerates it.
For a time, propaganda could paper over the gap between rhetoric and reality. The enemy was immigrants. The enemy was China. The enemy was the deep state, the fake news, the coastal elites. The culture war was stoked to a rolling boil to keep attention away from material conditions. But propaganda has a shelf life, and the Iran war has accelerated its expiry dramatically. Gas prices have broken four dollars a gallon for the first time in four years. Mortgage rates have risen for five consecutive weeks. Inflation expectations, already elevated, have worsened further.
Propaganda has a shelf life, and the Iran war has accelerated its expiry dramatically.
The polling numbers tell a story of collapse. Trump's approval rating on the economy has fallen to a new career low of 31 percent, according to CNN, with roughly two-thirds of Americans saying his policies have made economic conditions worse. His overall approval has dipped below 40 percent for the first time in his second term, with a net rating of minus 16.9. The University of Massachusetts Amherst poll put him as low as 33 percent overall, with researchers describing the numbers as "brutal" and noting drops of close to 20 points among men, working-class Americans, African Americans, moderates, and independents, the very groups whose support brought him back to the White House in 2024. For a politician who has always operated on the thinnest of margins, that number represents catastrophe.
The midterms loom, and they threaten to be devastating. Democrats have led the generic ballot in every single national poll taken since May 2025. The pattern, if it holds, points toward wave territory for Democrats by November. A significant takeover of the House or Senate would do more than slow Trump's legislative agenda. It would expose him to oversight, investigation, and the kind of accountability that his personal, family, and financial interests cannot survive. The MAGA project, which has always been as much about the enrichment of Trump and his inner circle as about any coherent political program, would face existential threat.
This is the contradiction that cannot be resolved through democratic competition. And that may be precisely why the response to it is ceasing to be democratic.
The Machinery of Electoral Sabotage
The moves are already underway, and they deserve to be named clearly, not as speculation, but as observable, documented fact.
The legislative effort to suppress voting began with the original SAVE Act in 2025 and has now evolved into the far more expansive SAVE America Act, which passed the House in February 2026. As the Center for American Progress documents, this legislation would require voters to present a passport or birth certificate in person to register to vote, disenfranchising potentially millions of citizens. Crucially, these Americans are disproportionately working-class people of color, married women who have changed their names, young people, and low-income voters. The bill would also implement extreme documentation requirements at polling places, restrict mail voting, and require all states to submit their voter registration rolls to the Department of Homeland Security. The Campaign Legal Center estimates that election officials could face criminal penalties of up to five years in prison for registering someone without the required documents, even if that person is a citizen.
The Brennan Center has stated the danger plainly: "The SAVE Act would stop millions of American citizens from voting. It would be the most restrictive voting bill ever passed by Congress. It is Trump's power grab in legislative garb." As the Senate stalls on the bill, Trump has insisted Republicans end the filibuster to force it through, while simultaneously pressuring Republican governors to enact state-level versions. Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota, and Utah have already complied. In the meantime, Steve Bannon has said aloud what many have thought privately, that ICE deployments to airports in recent months have been a "test run to really perfect ICE's involvement in the 2026 midterm elections."
Then there is JD Vance. This week, Trump formally designated his vice president as the national "fraud czar," heading a federally constituted task force with nationwide jurisdiction. Trump specified that while Vance's focus would be "everywhere," it would "primarily" target California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, New York, and other Democratic-led states. The move closely followed the swearing-in of a new Assistant Attorney General for National Fraud Enforcement who reports directly to Vance and the president. Whatever the stated rationale of combating healthcare and social services fraud, the political targeting is explicit. The administration is constructing federal law enforcement tools aimed with open precision at the states most likely to vote against it in November.
Taken individually, each of these moves can be rationalized away. Yet together, they describe something coherent and deeply alarming.
And then there is the firing of Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi was removed from office this week, not because she was too independent or insufficiently loyal, but because Trump felt she had not moved aggressively enough to prosecute his political enemies. Federal judges had thrown out indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Career prosecutors had warned that cases against other Trump targets lacked sufficient evidence. Courts had held DOJ officials in contempt. The president, frustrated, concluded that Bondi had not delivered. As a former DOJ attorney told NPR, Bondi "took a sledgehammer to the Justice Department and its workforce," and yet she was still not compliant enough. Her replacement is expected to be even more willing to use the department as a personal instrument of political retribution.
Taken individually, each of these moves can be rationalized away. Yet together, they describe something coherent and deeply alarming. They describe a government methodically removing or degrading the mechanisms, judicial, electoral, military, prosecutorial, by which a democratic system constrains and, when necessary, removes leaders who have lost public support.
Why Iran, Why Now
Which brings us back to the war, and why it may not be separable from any of this.
Wars do things that are useful to leaders facing political collapse. They activate nationalism. They shift media attention. They generate a rally-around-the-flag dynamic that briefly suspends normal political gravity and makes ordinary voters feel, however fleetingly, that this is not the moment for partisan criticism. They make the argument, always available and always dangerous, that dissent is disloyalty, that the Commander-in-Chief must not be undermined while American forces are in the field and American lives are at stake.
They also, crucially, create conditions of emergency that can be used to justify the postponement or disruption of normal democratic procedures. We have seen this logic deployed before, in other countries, in other eras. The emergency that never quite ends. The election that needs to be delayed, just this once, for reasons of national security. The opposition party that finds itself accused not of political disagreement but of actively aiding the enemy. The president whose wartime authority, he insists, should not be constrained by normal constitutional limits.
We are not there yet. But the distance between where we are and where this logic leads has arguably never been shorter in modern American history.
The budget that funds the war was released simultaneously with the gutting of the domestic programs that might otherwise give Trump's voters a reason to keep faith with his project. The generals who might push back against both the war strategy and the broader authoritarian drift have been fired and replaced by loyalists. The attorney general who was not pursuing political enemies aggressively enough has been removed. The voting restrictions designed to reduce participation by those least likely to support the Republican Party are advancing at the state and federal level simultaneously. The vice president has been handed a law enforcement tool specifically calibrated to target Democratic states in an election year.
None of these things, by itself, constitutes definitive proof of an intention to cancel or subvert the 2026 midterm elections. But the pattern they form, when viewed as a whole, is not ambiguous. It is the pattern of a government that is preparing the ground, legally, institutionally, militarily, for the possibility that it will not accept an unfavorable electoral outcome.
The Coming War on Democracy
Critics of Trump have spent nearly a decade describing him as an existential threat to democracy. That characterization has sometimes felt abstract, a warning about norms, institutions, and long-term trajectories that serious people took seriously but that never quite seemed to crystallize into something immediate and irreversible.
It no longer feels abstract.
What appears to be taking shape is a deliberate, multi-front effort to construct the conditions under which electoral democracy in the United States can be formally or informally suspended, and to build, through the military budget, through institutional purges, through legal mechanisms, through the systematic targeting of opposition strongholds, the structural supports that would make such suspension survivable for those carrying it out.
The Iran war may be reckless. It may be destabilizing. It may ultimately prove to be a catastrophic foreign policy blunder with devastating consequences for the region and the global economy. All of that can be true. It probably is true.
What appears to be taking shape is a deliberate, multi-front effort to construct the conditions under which electoral democracy in the United States can be formally or informally suspended...
But it may also be something else simultaneously. It may be a cornerstone, laid deliberately, at precisely this political moment, in a project whose ultimate aim is not victory in the Middle East, but the elimination of the political threat that a free and fair American election now represents to the people currently in power. A government that has lost public confidence, that faces the prospect of a wave election, and that has spent more than a year systematically hollowing out the institutions that might constrain it, does not need to announce its intentions in order for those intentions to become clear.
History is full of democracies that ended not with a single dramatic coup, but with a long sequence of individually explicable steps that combined proved irreversible. Each step seemed manageable. Each step could be rationalized. Each step was followed by warnings from critics that were dismissed as alarmism, right up to the moment when the warnings turned out to have been, if anything, not alarmed enough.
The question is no longer whether American democracy is under sustained and serious threat. The evidence for that is overwhelming and on the record. The question is whether enough people, in Congress, in the courts, in civil society, and in the streets, recognize the full scope of what is happening, and whether they are willing to act on that recognition before the window to act closes. That window, history suggests, does not stay open forever.
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