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It's No Accident That Trump's Iran War Steals Money From Healthcare and Education
Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64% increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades.
Apr 16, 2026
Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, spoke candidly years ago about why Republicans like tax cuts so much. In his 1986 book, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, he confided that tax cuts served the purpose of creating budget deficits that could then be used to justify spending cuts on government programs. Typically, administrations only cut spending for a program if it’s no longer necessary, and the resultant surplus may then be used as a tax cut to stimulate the economy. However, Stockman turned this on its head by using the tax cuts to create a budgetary crisis that would then require cuts in spending regardless of whether the programs were necessary or not.
In other words, Stockman used tax cuts to create a revenue problem that the Reagan administration could then mask as a spending problem. This is known as “starving the beast.” The administration starves the beast—important government services—of important tax revenues in order to slash government spending.
Stockman himself admitted the failure of this strategy since budget deficits during the Reagan administration did not bring down public spending in a meaningful way. This failure, however, didn’t stop the next generation of conservatives from making it a key part of their larger political project. In 2001 and 2003, for instance, George W. Bush pushed through massive tax cuts meant to impose a “fiscal straitjacket” on Congress. This then prompted Bush’s Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 to gut government programs.
Republican lawmakers attempted this again after they took control of the House of Representatives during the Obama administration in 2010. At the time, the US economy was struggling through the Great Recession, which congressional Republicans blamed on government profligacy and “out of control spending.” Not only did they hold the debt ceiling hostage to prevent future spending, but they urged more tax cuts to stimulate the economy. In general, starving the beast has become a more common, and outright underhanded, stratagem by which lawmakers have gone about cutting federal spending.
What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs?
This strategy has also functioned as a form of class politics: Wealthy elites are often the main beneficiaries of the tax cuts financed by cuts in social services on which the average American is more likely to depend. For instance, Reagan’s 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act slashed top marginal tax rates from 70% to 50%, a rate that only the top 2% of Americans paid (those rates dropped even further to 28% in 1986). This cut was largely paid for with reductions in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, Medicaid funding, student loans, and other social services. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 served the same agenda. According to research by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the richest 20% received 65% of the benefits of those tax cuts, while the top 5% received 38%. Spending was then cut under the Deficit Reduction Act by targeting Medicaid, Medicare, the Migrant and Season Farmworkers Program, literacy programs, and others.
The American public is now far more aware of who has, and who has not, benefited from cuts in taxes and spending, and public opinion makes it harder for lawmakers to starve the beast. New polling shows that only 19% of Americans support the idea of cutting taxes on the wealthy, while 58% say the wealthy should be paying more (this number rises to 63% when asked about large businesses and corporations). At the same time, the majority of Americans want the government to maintain spending on the kinds of programs that are usually targeted, such as Medicaid and food stamps, medical and cancer research, federal childcare programs, or the arts in public schools. In other words, Republican lawmakers are going to have a harder time gutting these programs by further cutting top marginal tax rates.
That is why they are finding new ways to starve the beast. The latest strategy has been to leverage the heavy cost of national security issues.
Nowhere is this more evident than through the US and Israel’s joint war with Iran. The bombing of Iran has proven to be even more expensive than the initial stages of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the daily burn rate averaging around $1-2 billion a day. Shortly after launching the war in late February, President Donald Trump sought an additional $200 billion from Congress to fund it. The GOP is now using that price tag to plan massive cuts to important government programs.
In early April, for instance, Republicans proposed a reconciliation bill they claim would save $30 billion but would also drive up the out-of-pocket premium costs and increase the number of people without health insurance. Later that week, Trump candidly spoke of his intentions to slash government spending against the backdrop of a budgetary crisis caused by the war:
We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people, we’re fighting wars […] Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal [level]. We have to take care of one thing: military protection—we have to guard the country. But all these little things, all these little scams that have taken place, you have to let states take care of them.
Trump’s claim that the United States can’t afford these programs are patently false. Programs like Medicare and Medicaid are planned spending that are not responsible for budget deficits.
However, the president’s comments make sense when contextualized against his longer-term plans to rein in federal spending. Through the creation of DOGE, Trump attempted to usher in an era of “government efficiency,” which included sharp reductions in several programs including Medicare and Medicaid. Although technically still operational, DOGE is largely seen as a failure as it never achieved its goal of major spending cuts (in fact, government spending increased 6% in 2025).
The Iran war can complete the job that DOGE couldn’t. Trump is currently asking for a $1.5 trillion military budget—a 64% increase in military spending since last year—which provides the budgetary pressure needed to justify gutting necessary programs that have been on the books for decades. In doing so, Trump is essentially reviving the starve-the-beast strategy by fitting it into a large military project.
Although the strategy to starve the beast has changed, the class politics remains the same. Those affected will be those most reliant on programs designed to provide healthcare, education, and food. However, in this case the consequence are no longer restricted to the American taxpayer. The increase in military expenditures will be used to inflict harm upon vulnerable populations abroad. The strikes in Iran have already killed thousands of people and displaced over a million civilians.
The horrifying reality is that this carries the very real danger of becoming a common finance strategy. What happens when conservative lawmakers want to cut more government spending in healthcare or education? Will they manufacture a national security crisis to justify cuts in those social programs? Trump’s war in Iran establishes just such a dangerous precedent. For this reason, the American people must realize that their livelihood at home requires placing greater controls on what a president can do abroad.
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US Racism Waged a Multigenerational Assault on the Mental Well-Being of Black People
I lived in American segregation for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls.
Apr 16, 2026
I was born in the American South in 1942 “in the land of the free and the home of the brave” (as the final stanza of the national anthem puts it). Francis Scott Key wrote those words in 1814. However, they were not true then, or in 1942, or today in Donald Trump’s all too reactionary America. My Blackness consigned obstacles to me (as it would have in 1814 and 1942) that white people simply don’t have.
Let me explain.
Life Under Racism
Throughout the 1950s, living in a segregated project in Kinston, North Carolina, there were several odd characters who (I now understand) were mentally ill. One was Snap—or that was what we called him anyway—a man of medium height and brown complexion with a fuzzy beard. Rain or shine, he walked around in the same grey overcoat, spring, summer, and winter, too. Frequently, he sat in a chair under the shade of an oak tree with his eyes closed while smoking a corncob pipe. I never heard him utter a single word, not one, so I didn’t even know if he could speak.
As a kid, I thought he might have been named Snap because his brain had been fractured or broken somehow. When we neighborhood kids were involved in games, he would walk right through the middle of them (as if we didn’t exist). If we were playing football and one of us was running out for a pass, Snap would walk between the ball in the air and the receiver, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. So, we would just continue to play as if he didn’t exist.
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches.
I once asked my mother what was wrong with Snap and she responded with a degree of certainty: “He’s not right in the head because a bullet was lodged in his brain.” But she explained nothing more. So that left me wondering how he could walk around with a bullet in his head.
I never learned what actually happened to him (though I hate to imagine it today). He was taken care of by relatives who lived a few doors away from us in the project. We children weren’t afraid of him, though he was different from any other adult we knew. Instead, I remember feeling sadness whenever I saw him. He seemed so lonely, being unable to communicate with anyone.
Another character in our community was Preacher. He pushed a wooden cart all over town, making noises with his mouth like a motor car in motion. In the cart were pots, pans, and old clothes. I heard that he had been a Jackleg Preacher, which in my community meant that he had been untrained as a minister, but that he had been spoken to by God and told to preach and carry his message. As with Snap, I never heard Preacher say a word, but I recognized that he was crazy and so got out of his way.
The project where we lived was a community in which the “different” and “damaged” existed next to the normal. In better-off communities across the country, both Snap and Preacher would have been sent to mental institutions, but not in our segregated community. I often wonder if they were living examples of what can happen to Black people when racism joins with other forces, including poverty, personal trauma, and abuse, to break the mind. I later came to wonder whether the trauma of racism was in part responsible for their inability to function in a normal way.
The Psychological Effects of Racism
Racism is insidious. It contorts the mind and everything it touches. In his classic book Black Skin, White Masks, Black psychiatrist Frantz Fanon developed accounts of the psychological effects of racism based, in part, on his own experiences in the French Caribbean. Some of the psychological conditions in the Black community can certainly be attributed to present-day racism, as well as to the multigenerational trauma inflicted on the descendants of American slavery. (Researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University are now examining the links between racism and mental illness, including schizophrenia and psychosis.)
Mental illness certainly found its way into my family. My sister Sherrill held a special place among us because she was the youngest of us and a girl. She was a very good student and a pious Catholic attending the Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic school in her early years. Intelligent and attractive, with the distinctively large eyes of my mother’s family, during her teenage years, she became politically engaged, actively participating in sit-ins, as well as civil rights demonstrations led by our brother Simeon. We had many conversations in our family about civil rights in this country, as well as about how African nations had overcome colonialism by declaring independence and about what all of that meant for our own futures. During that period, Sherrill was active in every aspect of our family life, had good friends, and (although she was moody and could be unusually withdrawn at times) didn’t appear to have the sort of psychological issues that would destroy her promising future.
In 1960, the nuns (all of whom were white) at her Catholic school suggested Sherrill would be a good candidate for the Order’s high school, Saint Joseph’s Academy, in Pennsylvania. The Order of the Most Precious Blood had been founded in Switzerland in 1834 as an active apostolic congregation devoted to Eucharistic prayer and ministry. The Order believed in positive change in the world, was strongly against injustice, and emphasized the value of education, enhancing its appeal to my family.
Isolation in the White World
Nonetheless, in those years, Saint Joseph’s Academy, a boarding school, was a typically white institution with only three or four Black women students attending. Until then, in the still largely segregated South, Sherrill had never been to a school with white students, nor lived among white people. She had been educated in a segregated Catholic elementary school in Kinston. In the new environment, I suspect, my sister was afraid, since she had to deal daily with verbal abuse by white nuns and students who all too often communicated hostile messages toward Blacks. Nor did the school provide any counseling services to help Black students deal with such a grim ongoing reality.
The Doll Test
Religion was at the center of life at St. Joseph’s, but that didn’t prevent Sherrill from experiencing racist aggressions. Many years later, Sarah, a friend of Sherill’s who attended the academy two years before my sister, told me of the hurt she felt when she was excluded from a social gathering at the home of another student because only whites were invited. The racist views of so many of the students, as well as the nuns themselves, were deeply rooted in their psyches, as was then (and remains) true for so much of white America. Did the nuns feel that Black girls weren’t as smart as white girls? Nor as attractive? Nor as spiritual? Undoubtedly. As we know from the famous study of Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark in what is called “the Doll Test,” the effects of segregation were devastating. The study was cited in the Supreme Court’s famous Brown v. Board of Education decision. The history of racism from the 1960s to the present moment suggests just what my sister must have experienced.
I believe she must have felt conflicted about leaving home and going to a school in a white community far away. In her frequent letters home, which I only recently reread, she expressed a great deal of loneliness. But she never said she wanted to leave the academy, holding onto her belief in the advantages such an education would provide. Many in the Black Catholic community in Kinston also believed the education provided to the young women at Saint Joseph’s was superior to that of the local segregated public school (and the Catholic school in Kinston did not go beyond eighth grade).
I knew at least five girls from Kinston who had preceded Sherrill to the Academy and for the most part believed the education was better. But today, looking back, I’ve reached a different conclusion. Education at the Academy for a Black young woman must be seen in the context of racism.
But Sherrill’s experiences as a Black girl in an almost completely white institution were not over with that school. She graduated from the academy in four years and matriculated at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (then, the women’s college of the University of North Carolina, which had only recently been integrated by a few Black students). Thus, my sister’s education after eighth grade was in white institutions that inevitably were at best deeply insensitive and at worst openly hostile to the needs of Black students.
Black Community Support
My brothers and I had a different experience. We all remained in Kinston, attending the segregated Adkin high school. After that, we went to North Carolina College, as the historically Black College in Durham was then called. (Now, it’s North Carolina Central University.) My extended family, friends, and teachers at such Black institutions provided me with the emotional and intellectual grounding I needed to navigate the Jim Crow segregationist world.
But my sister’s experiences—being Black and very alone—must have been a terrible shock for her, since she began exhibiting symptoms of mental illness while attending college. According to my mother, she started to hear voices, as well as imagine unreal events and presences. I now see clearly that racism, among other forces and factors, had a profound effect on her mental health and that it was a mistake for her to live in purely white environments at a critical time in her life, far from her family and the support of the Black community.
Worse yet, there was no help to be had then at St. Joseph’s or at the University of North Carolina. I wonder now whether she even realized what was happening to her. Her condition made it difficult at times for her to pay attention or make plans, although she still graduated with excellent grades. Did she believe that her psychological situation was due to her own weakness? Was she afraid? Ashamed? Did she see any connection between her increasing problems and the racism that affected all our lives? I suspect that she did as she aged and her condition worsened.
I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies.
There was another deep belief in our family, reflected in much of the Black community—that you must be stoic to overcome such grim external circumstances. The value of such stoicism and the adaptive capacity for resilience and resistance that goes with it has been deeply ingrained in the Black experience. Given slavery and then Jim Crow segregation, it was nothing less than an intuitive strategy for survival.
I don’t remember our mother’s response when Sherrill told her she was hearing voices, but I suspect she initially thought Sherrill was exaggerating, since she was doing well in college and that boded well for her future. At the time, our mother was still sensitive about having dropped out of high school at 16 to give birth to my brother Ricky, so she might have been reluctant to ask questions. I suspect she told Sherrill that it would all pass, that she would get through it—and Sherrill must have trusted those words because our mother had herself frequently exhibited an ability to rebound from severe pain and chronic discomfort.
And indeed, Sherrill persisted, graduated, and became a case worker for New York City’s Department of Welfare, working there for several years, maintaining social and family relationships, and even traveling to Europe with a friend. During that time, she must have also endured the pain of mental illness without complaint.
The break came in 1973. When Sherrill was 27 years old, our father, then only 51, died of a heart attack. Sherrill had been especially close to him and his death brought on full-blown psychotic symptoms. Shortly thereafter, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia but refused to take medication for that dreaded disease. Over time, she became unable to deal with daily life, was evicted from her apartment and, homeless, began living in shelters or on the streets of New York City.
We searched for her, but with no luck. Then, one day, while walking in Central Park, I suddenly saw her sitting under a large spruce tree with a small suitcase, eating a sandwich. She was wearing a sundress and brown sandals and had inserted wildflowers in her hair. She appeared strangely calm and content as I approached her and carefully inquired how was she managing, asking where lived. At first, she looked away as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then, she slowly turned in a regal fashion and said, “I live here.”
I responded, “You can’t live in Central Park,” and I tried to warn her about the dangers of doing so. She insisted, “Yes I can—others do it.” I attempted to encourage her to take medication, but she simply smiled and looked away. The more I tried to get her to come with me, the more agitated and resistant she became. Finally, hoping against hope that she would remain where I had left her, I walked the few blocks to my mother’s apartment to tell her where Sherrill was and what had happened, but when my mother and I returned, she was gone.
After that, we kept trying to find her and each time we were successful, Mama would tell my sister that she could live with her if she agreed to take medication for schizophrenia. But Sherrill refused, always walking away from us angrily, insisting that she was fine and that we were the ignorant ones, that she was “high born and high class” and we were “common nigras.”
How sad that was. After all her lack of intimacy with and connection to white people and all the support she had received from Blacks, Sherrill came to believe that Prince Charles of England was coming to save her, that he would be her knight in shining armor.
Interventions
Over a six-year period, family members and friends tried to intervene a number of times and we finally did convince Sherrill to live with our brother, Simeon, in San Francisco. He thought he would be able to get through to her, but after six months he couldn’t deal with her mental state anymore.
Then, Sherrill went to live with the nuns at Saint Joseph’s Academy in Pennsylvania at the invitation of Sister Barbara, a Black woman who grew up in Kinston, who was like family and the only Black nun at the Academy. But after a few months living there, Sherrill grew so difficult that the nuns couldn’t cope and she became homeless again.
Finally, after a few years of various attempts to house her with relatives or in shelters, my mother and Sister Barbara went to court in Pennsylvania, convincing a Judge that Sherrill was a “danger to herself and others.” I joined them near a medical facility where she was being held and, while there, she finally and reluctantly accepted medication for her psychosis. After the medication took effect, we were all shocked by how cogent Sherrill became and how willing—finally!—to accept our help. She was cared for by our mother in her home for the next 40 years of her life.
During many of those years, I took her to regular medical appointments, including visits to a psychiatrist. Once I was present while the psychiatrist spoke with her about her medications. Sherrill was largely unresponsive, answering in single words. I had sympathy for the psychiatrist because Sherrill was often unresponsive even to me. Clearly, she didn’t wish to engage in discussions regarding her illness and, as she grew older, she became more remote from family and friends, as well as from her doctors. Episodes of psychotic delusions were often followed by periods of seeming calm when she could appear to be nearly normal, even if she was shy and began to retreat from family gatherings.
However, on that occasion, the psychiatrist’s question to Sherrill evoked deep emotion in her and my sister’s response reopened in me a profound love and affection for her. The psychiatrist asked her: “How do you feel—it must be difficult to live with this difficult illness?” Sherrill looked glassy-eyed, said nothing for a moment, and then started to sob and continued to do so for a full five minutes. Her weeping revealed the depth of her despair, the loss and tragedy of her life. I cried with her, for her pain, for the loss of all she could have become, and the closeness to me and to our family that schizophrenia prevented.
For her remaining years, Sherrill retreated from much of life, cared for by my mother, brother, and me. Her last three years, which included the Covid-19 pandemic and another psychotic episode, were spent in a nursing home. She died on April 1, 2020, at 75, on the very day on which she had been born, in the nursing home at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when no one could even visit her body. Hers was a sad and tragic life.
Aftermath
I can’t be sure why my sister became mentally ill, but I do know that she didn’t receive the help of mental professionals in the early moments when she needed it. The reason? It wasn’t available to her because she was Black, without the necessary resources, and came to adulthood in high school and college in communities that did not understand the needs of a young Black woman. In its most profound sense, racism blinded those who were supposed to be her caretakers.
Thirteen generations of Black people were born into slavery in America. Four generations lived through American Jim Crow. These were systems built on the supposed inferiority of Black people. The legacy is a long one. I lived in American segregation—a virulent, racist Apartheid system—for nearly 25 years. I experienced the daily reminders that dominant white society and American laws deemed Black people less than equal. I saw the mental and psychological effects on my community—all the damaged souls. I know that, even today, the legacies remain, that hate is broad, and that Donald Trump and his objectively racist ideology have unearthed and seek to continue the worst of American policies. And all of that represented and still represents a severe, multigenerational assault on the psychological well-being of Black people. We all have had to face these assaults; some overcame them, some, like my sister, succumbed, but at the deepest level none of us could ignore them, not for a moment.
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JD Vance's Ambition Is Destroying Him
Vance had followed Trump into Orbán’s abyss, and now Trump is taking him on another losing journey.
Apr 16, 2026
As Prime Minister of Hungary for 16 years, Viktor Orbán became a beacon for the right and one of President Donald Trump’s favorite authoritarian role models. A self-described populist, Orbán’s conquest of democracy’s three pillars—the media, institutions of higher education, and the justice system—became Trump’s template.
Another Orbán characteristic attracted Trump: His regime consistently ranked No. 1 as the most corrupt country in the European Union. He abused political power for self-enrichment. He installed friends and family members in positions of influence and power that made him (and them) wealthy. He used his majority in the legislature to enhance his power. A persistent critic of Ukraine, Orbán also enjoyed the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Sound familiar?
Trump embraced and praised Orbán, which meant that his Vice President JD Vance embraced and praised him too.
Vance Surrendered to Ambition
In 2016, Vance had called himself a “Never Trump Guy” and wrote a New York Times op-ed titled, “Mr. Trump Is Unfit For Our Nation's Highest Office." But he reversed course in 2021 when he ran for the US. Senate and sought successfully to gain Trump’s endorsement.
As a junior senator, Vance could have refrained from voicing an opinion about Orbán. But ambition required otherwise. In a February 2024 interview with European Conservative, Vance was well aware of Trump’s views as he lobbied to become the vice-presidential pick on the Republican ticket. He held out Trump’s Hungarian idol as an example to emulate:
The closest that conservatives have ever gotten to successfully dealing with left-wing domination of universities is Viktor Orbán’s approach in Hungary. I think his way has to be the model for us: not to eliminate universities, but to give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.
Of course, Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—knew that Orbán did not offer a “much less biased approach to teaching.” He demanded instruction centered on his view of history and the world.
In the same 2024 interview, Vance previewed what would also become some of Trump’s tactics:
And whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made, and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture. And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.
In a July 2024 interview on Face the Nation, Vance reaffirmed his praise for Orbán’s approach:
What I do think is on the university—on the university principle, the idea that taxpayers should have some influence in how their money is spent at these universities. It’s a totally reasonable thing. And I do think that he’s made some smart decisions there that we could learn from in the United States.
It was only the beginning of Vance’s “awakening.”
Vance Carried Trump’s Message and Now Bears His Baggage
As vice president, Vance used his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 to attack many of Europe’s democracies by name—but not Hungary. He said that actors from within posed a greater threat than China or Russia: “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”
To a stone-faced audience of European leaders, Vance complained about “old, entrenched interests hiding behind ugly, Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion…”
In fact, what responsible leaders don’t like is misinformation and disinformation pervading the political landscape. Orbán relied on both, as have Trump and Vance.
And Vance declared that mass immigration was Europe's most significant problem, noting record levels of foreign-born residents in Germany and increased EU immigration from non-EU countries caused by “conscious decisions” from certain European leaders.
For Trump and Vance, leaders like Orbán were the antidote to the decline of Western civilization. But heading into the April 2026 election in Hungary, Orbán was down by double digits in the polls.
On April 8, Trump dispatched Vance to Budapest where he held a rally for the embattled leader. Vance portrayed Orbán as a hero:
I’m here because of the moral cooperation between our two countries. Because what the United States and Hungary together represent under Viktor’s leadership and under President Trump’s is the defense of Western civilization… The defense of the idea that we are founded on a certain Christian civilization and Christian values that animate everything from freedom of speech to rule of law to respect for minority rights and protection of the vulnerable.
Vance continued:
Will you stand for sovereignty and democracy? Will you stand for Western civilization? Will you stand for freedom, for truth, and for the God of our fathers? Then my friends, go to the polls in the weekend, stand with Viktor Orbán because he stands for you and he stands for all these things.
In fact, Orbán stood for none of those things.
The closest Trump got to the rally was a speakerphone call via Vance’s cellphone through which he said, “I love Hungary and I love that Viktor.”
Vance’s Reckoning Has Only Begun
On April 12, 2026, three days after Vance’s rally for Orbán, a reckoning arrived for all three men—Orbán, Trump, and Vance. In a landslide, Hungarian voters threw Orbán out of office. The populist had become unpopular, and Hungary’s citizens reclaimed their country.
Vance had followed Trump into Orbán’s abyss, and now Trump is taking him on another losing journey. Vance is the highest-ranking Catholic in the Trump administration, and he has joined Trump in attacking the Pope.
Sometimes ambition makes a person not only blind, but also deaf and dumb.
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'You Are Out of Touch': Schumer Faces New Calls to Step Aside After Israel Weapons Vote
"It’s well past time for him to step aside for leaders who actually represent the views of the party’s base."
Apr 16, 2026
Sen. Chuck Schumer faced fresh calls to step aside as the Senate Democratic leader on Wednesday after he broke with the overwhelming majority of his caucus and voted against a pair of resolutions aimed at preventing the Trump administration from selling more US bombs and bulldozers to Israel.
"Mr. Schumer, you are out of touch with the base of this party, and with your own caucus," Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who first called on Schumer to resign as Democratic leader last year, said in a short video posted to social media following Wednesday's votes. "Step aside."
The two resolutions, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), called for halting the sale of around $450 million worth of bulldozers, 1,000-pound bombs, and related military equipment to the Israeli government, which has repeatedly used American weaponry to commit war crimes in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria.
Despite facing record opposition from the Senate Democratic caucus—with 40 votes against the sale of bulldozers and 36 votes against the sale of bombs—the resolutions failed to pass, as Senate Republicans united against them.
But strong Democratic opposition to new US weapons sales to Israel was seen as evidence that the party is slowly catching up to its base, which overwhelmingly supports restricting American military aid to Israel.
"The fact that 40 of 47 Democratic senators voted to withhold military hardware from Israel is a new high-water mark in holding Israel accountable for violating US and international law," said Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy.
Williams went on to rebuke Schumer, who has led the Senate Democrats for nearly a decade, for opposing the resolutions "against the supermajority of his own caucus and Democratic voters."
"It’s well past time for him to step aside for leaders who actually represent the views of the party’s base," said Williams.
Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action and a New York City resident, said Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)—who also voted against both resolutions—"are betraying their constituents and woefully out of line with the Democratic voter base."
"Instead of sending the bombs that Israel uses to commit war crimes, the people of New York want our representatives to invest in lifesaving policies here at home," said Miller. "We need to stop arming Israel so that the people of Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran, and across the region, can live. Millions of lives depend on it."
The votes on the Israeli arms measures came after the Senate rejected another war powers resolution aimed at withdrawing US forces from the illegal assault on Iran, which President Donald Trump launched without congressional approval—and in partnership with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in late February.
Schumer vocally supported the Iran war powers resolution. But one of his colleagues, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), said the efforts to end the US-Israeli war on Iran and the push to halt weapons sales to Israel are interconnected.
"A vote to approve arms sales to Israel at this time would be seen as a message of approval for Trump and Netanyahu’s disastrous war against Iran. I will not send that message," Markey said in a statement late Wednesday. "Why would we send American military weapons that could prolong, escalate, or worsen this horrible situation in the Middle East? I say no more."
J Street, the pro-Israel liberal advocacy organization, similarly connected the two fights following Wednesday's votes.
"We continue to oppose Trump and Netanyahu’s war of choice against Iran, and applaud those senators whose principled stand in today’s vote reflects the American public’s strong opposition to both the Iran war and to Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank that undermine efforts for peace in the region," said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group's president.
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