Pete Hegseth’s Crazed, Angry Tirades on Iran Give Dems a Big Opening

It’s not enough for Democrats to say Trump’s war rationales haven’t been fully explained. The problem is that they are patently false.

Pete Hegseth knows that playing a decisive tough guy on television is the way to keep Donald Trump happy, so he did just that while addressing reporters Monday about the United States’ bombing of Iran. He hailed Trump’s supposed decisiveness. He strutted and preened about the bombing death of Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei. He angrily ridiculed his questioners. He barked out hard-sounding phrases like “war is hell.”

But what came out of Hegseth’s mouth was substantively about as clear as Trump’s Truth Social word vomit. He wouldn’t say whether American troops will face combat. He offered confusing depictions of our objectives, seemingly suggesting they’re about depriving Iran of “offensive capabilities” that remain hazily defined. He declared that “this is not a regime change” war while hailing Trump’s success thus far at...regime change. Which echoes Trump himself: In one weekend interview, Trump offered at least two competing versions of the changed Iranian regime he hopes to see.

All this gives Democrats an opening to take on this debate more forcefully. While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.

“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”

As Smith noted, there’s an important distinction between saying Iran poses a serious problem to the region and the world, and claiming it was so on the verge of attacking the United States that it required urgent defensive action. “It is made up to say........

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