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Democrats Have Let Republicans Become the 'Peace' Party
Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Oct 18, 2025
When President Donald Trump announced that he had helped broker an end to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, it marked the achievement of a goal many anti-war activists had been struggling toward for two years. Few were bothered by the fact that it was Trump who ultimately presided over the cessation of violence; the goal was always to end the bombing, by any means possible. Whether this deal amounts to a lasting end to violence in the region is all but certain; already, Israel has attacked and killed Palestinians in an apparent breach of the agreement’s terms. But, with a hostage swap underway, there is some reason to believe that this merciless, apocalyptic phase of the genocide in Gaza is coming to an end. As this fragile “ceasefire” takes hold, it is worth considering what this apparent diplomatic success means for Trump, his foreign policy going forward, and for his opposition.
For his part, Trump has long telegraphed his yearning to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As with any policy he pursues, the ends are always self-serving, and this latest round of peacemaking is no different. After his apparent success in Palestine, Trump has already announced his intent to broker a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine, ending another conflict that dogged his predecessor, Joe Biden. It is unlikely that Trump is earnestly committed to an anti-war legacy (see, for example, his illegal and outrageous attempts to draw Venezuela into open conflict). Rather, Trump is eager to shore up his image as a president who can end seemingly intractable conflicts. That Biden fumbled his handling of both Gaza and Ukraine so badly is just more inspiration for Trump to succeed where his nemesis failed.
Whether Trump can bring an end to the fighting in Ukraine before his term ends is an open question. His newfound enthusiasm for peacemaking, though, leaves his opposition, the Democrats, in a quandary. Biden’s term as president coincided with the onset of the two military conflicts that have come to dominate the 2020s, in Ukraine and Gaza. In both cases, Democrats, and much of the Republican establishment too, quickly lined up behind the US’ nominal allies: Israel and Ukraine. As the conflicts dragged on, though, a strain of isolationist skepticism provided an off-ramp for many Republicans, exemplified by members of Congress like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). By the time Trump’s 2024 campaign was off the ground, he was running on ending the war in Ukraine, even promising, with typical Trump bombast, to do so within his first 24 hours in office.
Meanwhile, Biden and other Democratic leaders were doubling down on their support for prolonging both conflicts. In Ukraine, Democrats repeatedly advocated for and voted to approve the shipment of weapons, even as the US’ own internal assessments were dubious about Ukraine’s chances for success. By 2024, unfaltering support for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s army had become largely identified with the Democrats, while Republicans dithered.
The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties.
And then there was Gaza. As Democratic Party leaders pledged undying fealty to Israel, the party’s base began to sour on US complicity in the wanton slaughter playing out in Gaza. While more international bodies confirmed that Israel’s onslaught there met the criteria for genocide, the Biden administration was unstinting in its support. Heading into 2024, signs mounted that Biden’s reelection bid (and, subsequently, Kamala Harris’ campaign) were threatened by constituents’ discontent over the administration’s Israel policy. Despite the gathering storm clouds, the party could not bring itself to depart from its initial hard-line support, even going as far as to bar a Palestinian-American speaker from its 2024 convention floor.
The massive disconnect between the Democratic Party’s leadership and its base is sure to have ramifications far beyond last year’s election. Recent polling has revealed that just 8% of Democratic voters are supportive of Israel’s “military action” in Gaza; meanwhile, just 55 of the 214 Democratic representatives in Congress (only 26%) support a bill to halt weapons shipments to Israel. The dealignment between Democrats’ base and elected leadership on this issue could hardly be more stark.
Now, Trump has succeeded where Biden failed in bringing some measure of peace to the region. The risk to Democrats is not so much that Trump will woo more Democratic constituents to the Republican Party—Trump’s authoritarian tendencies at home and his vile persecution of all perceived political enemies largely foreclose that possibility. The risk, rather, is that Americans who care about peacemaking abroad will find themselves increasingly alienated from both parties. Trump’s successful diplomatic efforts have put the lie to the idea that there was nothing Biden and the Democrats could have done to end the massacre in Gaza, seriously undermining any claim that Democrats might make as the party of peace.
Some Democrats seem to understand what a dire bind the party has put itself in. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), for example, recently sounded the alarm about Democrats ceding the “anti-war” mantle to Republicans and Trump. Others, like Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), have put this opposition to war-making into legislation, authoring the aforementioned Block the Bombs Act.
But, for the Democrats to truly turn the ship around, many more elected representatives will have to follow in the footsteps of Khanna and Ramirez. If the party cannot quickly change its tune on war and peace, it may risk ceding this policy terrain to the Republican Party well into the future.
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Why Can't the Corporate Media See the Trump-GOP Shutdown Plan Lying in Plain Sight?
The power struggles that animate this shutdown are meant to outlast it, leveraging legal ambiguities, executive fiat, and congressional paralysis to redefine “essential” as that which survives unchallenged.
Oct 18, 2025
What is it about an insidious, long-term plan that causes commercial media to ignore what’s lying in plain sight?
With Congress at a standstill, the Republican-led House refusing to return to session, and the Senate unable to pass any bill to reopen the government, reporters seem stuck in a loop.
Coverage of a government shutdown typically focuses on counting days and political blame games. Politicians are described as being stuck in an “impasse” with party leaders attacking one another and workers and the economy facing uncertain “disruption” and “fallout.”
That’s been the media’s approach again this time, even as workers are screaming in every way they can that this isn’t your usual standoff.
While pundits tally days and trade soundbites, workers whose livelihoods hang in the balance—people like Palmer Heenan and Paul Osadebe, whistleblowers at the Department of Housing and Urban Development—have sounded the alarm with all the clarity the headlines lack.
In our conversation recently, they underscored that today’s crisis started long before the government shutdown three weeks ago — and it isn’t simply about budgets or bureaucrats, it’s about dismantling the public goods that millions depend on and the rights that generations have fought for, and implementing a radical blueprint that reactionaries have publicly laid out.
In a 2023 essay published by the conservative Claremont Institute, a former Trump administration official writing under the pseudonym “Lancelot A. Lamar” urged future Republican agency heads along with the OMB to suspend all programs they didn’t like, and maintain “tactical discipline" for as long as possible.
“There will be plenty of media sob stories and congressional fulmination, fed by the bureaucracy, about the suspension of ‘vital’ programs,” wrote Lamar. “These are attempts to gain concessions outside of formal negotiations, as well as tests of the administration’s unity and will.”
Lamar urged the future Republican administration that he and Russell Vought (now budget director) were planning for, to try to continue a shutdown “at least through day 91 when hundreds of thousands of feds could be laid off, reshaping the bureaucracy according to the administration’s views of what is essential.”
The law governing shutdowns is skimpy. The Appropriations Clause of the Constitution says that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law”. The Antideficiency Act (ADA) of 1870 prohibits officials from spending “any sum in excess of appropriations made by Congress.” But neither says what to do when appropriations run out. Lamar urged "America First" lawyers to fight over all of it.
The point is, the power struggles that animate this shutdown are meant to outlast it, leveraging legal ambiguities, executive fiat, and congressional paralysis to redefine “essential” as that which survives unchallenged.
As we enter week three, the administration has managed to find funds for the military and ICE. There’s still money to make mayhem from Chicago to Caracas.
As for the rest, as Lamar argued, if no one but federal workers notice the absence, the program never mattered.
That's why the media coverage counts. As Paul and Palmer and their allies at the Federal Unionist Network (FUN) remind us by risking their jobs to speak out, by marching, by organizing, and by refusing to shut up—it is not enough just to ask who wins or loses this week's fight. The battle for the purse strings—waged between Congress and the executive—forges new precedents every day, and the stakes—like the casualties—are invisible only if we choose not to look.
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Unmasking the Dangerous Extremism in Young Republicans
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
Oct 17, 2025
Just this week, Politico exposed private Telegram chats among Young Republican leaders where they didn’t just flirt with Nazi-style extremism, they reveled in it.
In thousands of leaked messages from across the nation, rising GOP stars praised Adolf Hitler, joked about sending political rivals into gas chambers, and mocked the very idea of human dignity.
One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber… Great, I love Hitler.” Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism.
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers across the United States. Seven out of ten have never been convicted of a crime.
Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under President Donald Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.
This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.
And Americans, by and large, are looking away.
History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.
But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.
At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”
By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.
That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”
And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at brown people?
They pretend tearing people from their lives without trial is just part of the immigration process.
They pretend spiriting away hundreds of desperate migrants to a foreign dictatorship’s prison is ordinary enforcement.
They pretend masked men grabbing people off American streets are “just following orders.”
But what this really is—and what we must call it without hesitation—is the birth of an unaccountable neofascist American secret police.
This isn’t about whether we want immigration laws enforced; there’s virtually no debate about that. It’s about whether the president can create an authorized, masked secret police force that answers to him rather than the law.
When police are anonymous, when courts are bypassed, when disappearances are tolerated, freedom itself is on the line.
If it can happen to a farmworker in Texas, it can happen to a protester in Portland, a journalist in New York, or a political opponent anywhere in America. It can happen to me, and it can happen to you.
History irrefutably shows us that unaccountable power always expands.
We like to tell ourselves, “It can’t happen here.” But it already is. People are being taken without judicial warrants. Families are left without answers. Courts are being circumvented. Transfers and detentions happen in the dark.
Meanwhile, Americans are being trained to look the other way, just as the “good Germans” did. That is how democracy has died in a nation after nation, from Russia to Egypt to Turkey to Hungary, not with a single dramatic blow, but with the slow normalization of injustice until the unthinkable becomes everyday routine.
And this is why shrugging, shaking our heads, or tweeting our dismay is not enough. History demands more.
The people who stood by in 1930s Germany told themselves it was temporary, or they stayed quiet, or they made excuses. Their silence made tyranny possible.
We must not make the same mistake.
JD Vance brushed off the scandal, telling Americans to “grow up” about the leaked Hitler-loving group chat, calling it “kids doing stupid things.”
As Robert Hubble points out in his excellent Substack newsletter:
The leaders were in their 20s and 30s and held political jobs, including
— Chief of Staff to New York State Assembly member Mike Reilly;
— Staffer for New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt
— Communications Assistant for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach
— Employee at New York State Unified Court System
— Employee at Center for Arizona Policy
— Senior Adviser in the Office of General Counsel, US Small Business Administration (in the Trump administration)
In short, these were not “kids,” nor were they “college students.” They were adults with responsible jobs.
To excuse that as youthful mischief isn’t just a simple lie, it’s an endorsement of literally early Hitler-style fascism. When elected officials defend calls for racially based mass slaughter as harmless immaturity, they tell the country that hate is acceptable, cruelty is normal, and history no longer matters.
Every act of unaccountable state violence must be called out. Every attempt to sideline the courts must be resisted. Every agency twisted into a political weapon must be exposed and reformed.
The Constitution does not protect itself. Democracy does not run on autopilot. Freedom only survives when citizens refuse to accept the unacceptable.
That means showing up at protests, speaking out at meetings, demanding accountability from lawmakers, and refusing to let media normalize secret police tactics in the United States of America.
There was a time in America when Republicans like my father were the ones warning of the dangers of America becoming an oppressive police state. We must reach out to our Republican elected officials and remind them that Ronald Reagan, John McCain, and Barry Goldwater would not tolerate this sort of thing.
America is at a turning point. We can let this slide and hope the system rights itself. Or we can recognize that once the precedent of unaccountable detention and disappearance is accepted, it will never stop at immigrants or refugees. It will spread, as it always does, to silence dissent and crush opposition.
Already Trump is publicly going through a new list of people he wants to prosecute. Even Victor Orban hasn’t gone that far; this is pure Putin stuff.
The masked men who today drag away the undocumented will tomorrow drag away the protester, the critic, the rival. That’s how it worked then. That’s how it works now in Russia, the country is Trump is praising and using it as his model.
So I’m asking you, as forcefully as I know how: stand up. Speak out. Call your elected officials, both federal, state, and local, particularly the Republicans.
Show up this Saturday for No King Day and every day after that. Refuse to live in a country where the president commands his own secret police. Refuse to look away when your government disappears human beings into the shadows. Refuse to be a “good German.”
This is still our republic, but only if we defend it. That time is now.
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