“No Kings” Has to Become “No More Wars”

On Friday night, Senator Bernie Sanders took his populist message of fighting oligarchy to Tulsa, Oklahoma, drawing a crowd of nearly 6,000. During his speech a woman from the audience yelled out, “We just bombed Iran!” Gasps of horror could be heard as both the senator and the audience tried to process the news, many in the audience muttering, “Oh dear God.” A Sanders staffer rushed to the stage and handed the senator a paper, containing a print of Donald Trump’s tweet announcing America’s newest war. Sanders, visibly disgusted, read from the tweet while a chant started rising from the audience of “No more war!” In videos from the event, you can see the rage spread through the crowd like a prairie fire as the cry grows louder and louder, “No more war, no more war, no more war!”

Sanders was well prepared for the passions that had overtaken the audience. Unlike almost all of his colleagues in Congress, he had been at the forefront of trying to rein in Trump’s foreign policy, having introduced the No War Against Iran Act on Monday, repeatedly emphasizing that any unilateral attack on Iran without congressional approval would be unconstitutional. But Sanders is the exception. Among both Republicans and Democrats, Trump’s war will present a challenge, since both parties are in truth divided on the subject.

The anger at the Sanders rally is an early premonition of how Trump’s decision to openly join Israel in its war against Iran has upended American politics. There was already a large and growing opposition to Trump’s presidency. Last weekend’s “No Kings” rally drew between 4 and 6 million people in hundreds of cities and towns, which means it might have been the biggest one-day protest in American history. The slogan “No Kings” succinctly encapsulates the dangers of Trump as an autocrat, a threat made clear in his immigration crackdown, his war against academia, his shunting aside of Congress, his frequent expressions of contempt for the courts, and his attempt to transform the military into a private security force at his beck and call. All of these are urgent issues—but the dangers they pose to democracy will only be intensified if the United States enters a prolonged war, which will not just strengthen Trump’s autocratic tendencies but give him even more opportunities to exploit the terrifying power of the American national security state against enemies both at home and abroad.

With this new war, the slogan “No More War” has become as urgent as “No Kings.” The merit of “No more war!” as a rallying cry is that it both highlights Trump’s betrayal of his party and can help Democrats overcome one of their biggest problems—the dominance of an establishment that is wildly out of touch with the American public.

Donald Trump’s decision to become a war president rests on a paradox: He rose to power in no small part because he was able to harness the anger many Americans felt at the bipartisan foreign policy establishment that supported George W. Bush’s failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the believers in Trump as an agent of a new foreign policy was Vice President JD Vance. In 2016, Vance, then a Trump critic, wrote in The New York Times that Trump’s willingness to attack Bush’s foreign policy “reflects what people like most about him: his complete break with the party elite.” Revisiting this topic in The Wall Street Journal in 2024, Vance argued that “Trump’s best foreign policy” was “not starting any wars.”

But Trump has ended up destroying the right-wing anti-war position that he helped popularize. As I’ve noted in earlier columns, Trump’s administration has always been deeply divided between a faction of “American First” right-wingers (who want to withdraw from the Middle East and Europe to concentrate on China) and more mainstream neoconservatives (who are hawkish on every front). With the attack on Iran, it is clear which side has won the factional battle. The neoconservatives are in charge, and Trump’s promise of ending the age of the forever wars has turned out to be a lie.

The triumph of militarism has left the anti-war Republicans scrambling. Representative Thomas Massie remains a principled critic of militarism and is sponsoring with Democratic Representative Ro Khanna a War Powers Resolution. But Trump is targeting Massie by supporting an effort to defeat him in next year’s primary. Appearing on Face the Nation, Massie offered this forlorn hope: “There are still voices in this administration—you’ve still got JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr—you’ve still got calmer heads that could prevail.” In truth, none of those names inspire confidence. They are all opportunists who will shift in whatever direction Trump directs them to turn.

Appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, Vance said: