With Us or Against Us, Again
Congress didn’t authorize this war, and the only response to questions is a loyalty test we’ve fallen for before.
Marc Thiessen, the former chief speechwriter for George W. Bush, posted on X this week. He just can’t understand the logic, he wrote, of Democrats “siding with Iran.”
That’s the whole thing, right there, in one sentence. If you oppose the war, you are siding with the enemy. If you think the president should have gotten congressional authorization before launching Operation Epic Fury, you are siding with the enemy. If you note that Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency contradicted his stated justification for the strikes, you are siding with the enemy. There is one acceptable position, and it is total agreement. Everything else gets filed under treason or something like it.
Trump, for his part, said the same thing louder. “What most people understand is that they are only complaining BECAUSE I DID IT,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, going after Democrats who’ve criticized the strikes. “The fact is, whatever I do, they will be on the opposite side. These people are SICK, CRAZY, and DEMENTED.”
Thiessen says it in pundit-speak. Trump says it in all caps. Both saying the same thing: get in line.
If you’ve been alive for the last 25 years, you’ve heard this before. You’ve probably heard it from some of the same people. And if you know who Marc Thiessen is, the déjà vu is about to get very specific.
The script
Here’s how this works. It’s the same every time. A president launches a military operation without congressional approval. Critics raise objections. Maybe it’s about legality. Maybe it’s about strategy. Maybe it’s about the fact that the justification doesn’t hold up. The specifics vary, but the next part doesn’t.
Supporters skip past the objection entirely and go straight to motive. You’re not questioning the war. You’re siding with the enemy. “Siding with Iran.” “Maduro supporter.” “Saddam lover.” Pick your era, fill in the blank.
Now the critic is on defense. They have to prove they’re not rooting for the bad guy before anyone will engage with what they actually said. So they lead with a concession. “Of course, Iran is terrible, BUT...” “Obviously, Maduro is a dictator, BUT...” They’re trying to clear a loyalty checkpoint before getting to their point.
But the concession does something worse than fail. By opening with “Iran is bad,” the critic has already accepted the terms of the argument. They’ve agreed that the question on the table is whether Iran is bad. And once that’s the question, the answer is obvious, and anything you say after “but” sounds like an asterisk on something everyone already agrees about. The real questions (did the president lie about the justification? is this legal? does the public support it?) never get asked because the critic just spent their opening statement answering a question nobody actually disagreed about.
The pattern
President George W. Bush gave the modern framework its catchphrase. On September 20, 2001, standing before a joint session of Congress, he told the world: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Six weeks later, at a press conference with French President Jacques Chirac, he boiled it down: “You’re either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”
That framework helped sell both the immediate response to 9/11 and the Iraq War, which was built on claims about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. Iraq cost the United States trillions of dollars and the lives of more than 4,000 American service members and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The framework did its job.
Marc Thiessen was there for all of it. He joined the Bush administration in 2001 as chief speechwriter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, working out of the Pentagon. He was in the building when it was hit on September 11. He later moved to the White House, eventually becoming Bush’s own chief speechwriter. He spent years crafting the language that told Americans to pick a side or be sorted into the enemy camp.
The same guy
So here’s where Thiessen is now: Washington Post columnist. Fox News contributor. And the author of Courting Disaster, a 2010 book arguing that the CIA’s use of waterboarding was effective, lawful, and moral. That last one is worth keeping in mind. When Thiessen talks about America’s moral authority abroad, remember that he wrote an entire book defending torture.
On the day the bombs started falling on Iran, Thiessen went on Fox News and called it a historic triumph. On Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (an organization on whose board he sits) and addressed Iranians directly: “This is your fall of the Berlin Wall.” And on X, he posted that he couldn’t understand why Democrats were “siding with Iran.” Three platforms, three registers, one argument: get in line.
What makes Thiessen worth watching, though, is the timeline. He was on the Guy Benson Show on January 12, weeks before the strikes began. Iranian protesters were in the streets. Trump had threatened intervention but hadn’t acted. And Thiessen was already talking about why the U.S. should “decapitate the regime” and describing the left’s opposition as a “sickness,” accusing critics of equivocating the Trump administration and the Iranian regime. The framework was locked in before the first bomb dropped. Before there was a military operation to debate, the terms of said debate had already been set: if you hesitate, something is wrong with you.
The dress rehearsal
Two months earlier, the framework got a test run in Venezuela.
On January 3, 2026, the U.S. military launched Operation Absolute Resolve, capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro without congressional authorization. Trump announced that the U.S. would “run the country” until a transition could take place. Democrats objected, mostly on constitutional grounds, and they were careful about it.
Schumer’s statement opened: “Let me be clear: Nicolás Maduro is an illegitimate dictator. But launching military action without congressional authorization and without a credible plan for what comes next is reckless.” Jeffries devoted his entire first paragraph to condemning Maduro — calling him “a criminal and authoritarian dictator,” saying the rule of law had “broken down” — before mentioning Trump or Congress at all.
The day after the operation, Axios reported that some Democrats privately wanted their colleagues to stop criticizing the operation and start celebrating. The headline was “’It looks weak’: Some Democrats want their party to shut up and clap for Maduro’s capture.” One anonymous House Democrat told Axios, “Maduro is bad, glad he is gone ... You can’t have it both ways.” Another said, “If you don’t acknowledge when there is a win for our country, then you lose all credibility.” These were Democrats, arguing from inside the caucus that the binary was correct. It wasn’t even enough to throat-clear about how bad Maduro was. Either you celebrate, or you look like you’re on the wrong side.
The Ayatollah Protection Act
So far, this has been a story about Republicans and conservative pundits telling Democrats to pick a side. But the framework doesn't belong to any party. It belongs to whoever picks it up.
In February, a bipartisan war powers resolution would have required Trump to get congressional authorization before attacking Iran. Rep. Jared Moskowitz told Jewish Insider what he thought of it. “They should just rename it the Ayatollah Protection Act because that’s what it does,” he said. “I am not willing to preemptively tell the supreme leader that he has nothing to worry about, no reason to negotiate because you are totally safe, and that the people of Iran can’t depend on us.”
It’s an effort to redefine what the vote means. A vote to require the president to follow the Constitution’s rules about declaring war becomes, in Moskowitz’s telling, an act of protection for the enemy. The War Powers Resolution becomes a gift to the Ayatollah. If you vote yes, you’re telling Iran it’s safe.
Sen. John Fetterman’s version came two days after the attack when he posted on X: “Every member in the U.S. Senate agrees we cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. I’m baffled why so many are unwilling to support the only action to achieve that. Empty sloganeering vs. commitment to global security, which is it?”
Fetterman’s version is even slipperier than Moskowitz’s. There’s no name-calling, no “Ayatollah Protection Act.” It sounds reasonable. But look at what it’s actually doing. It starts with a premise virtually everyone agrees on (Iran shouldn’t have nuclear weapons) and treats this specific unauthorized military operation as the only possible conclusion (as opposed to, say, a nuclear agreement). If you agree with the premise, you must support the war. If you don’t support the war, you’re just sloganeering. “The only action” forecloses every other option, including diplomacy, including the fact that the U.S. and Israel had already hit Iran’s nuclear sites eight months earlier.
This is the same framework Thiessen uses, but deployed from inside the Democratic caucus.
The throat-clearing trap
So what are Democrats supposed to say? Look at what they actually said and a pattern emerges fast.
Schumer, on February 28: “When I talked to Secretary Rubio, I implored him to be straight with Congress and the American people about the objectives of these strikes and what comes next. Iran must never be allowed to attain a nuclear weapon, but the American people do not want another endless and costly war in the Middle East when there are so many problems at home.”
Jeffries, the same day: Iran is “a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region.” But, he continued, “the Trump administration must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.”
Two different Democratic leaders. Same structure. Open by accepting the administration's premise, then pivot to process. Schumer's version has the literal 'but.' Jeffries doesn't need one. The pivot does the work on its own.
There are Democrats who skip the concession, and their statements come across a lot stronger. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Marine veteran, called it “a war of choice without congressional authorization.” No “Iran is bad, but.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren went further. She called the war “dangerous and illegal” and said it was “built on lies.” That last phrase matters. “Built on lies.” That’s the message. Not “the president should have asked Congress first.” The war is built on lies.
The Democratic response is a spectrum, from Schumer’s full concession to Warren’s near-miss. But none of them do what their own voters already believe: this war is wrong, the justification is a lie, and it should stop. The administration would love for the question being debated to be “is the Iranian regime bad?” Schumer and Jeffries appear to be okay with the question being “should the president have asked permission?” But the question the public is already answering is “should this be happening at all?” Jack Roush at the London School of Economics’ US Politics blog made the same comparison to 2004, when John Kerry tried to criticize the Iraq War’s management without opposing its underlying mission and got outflanked from both sides.
The throat-clearing might actually make the administration’s framing stronger. When Schumer says “Iran must never get nukes” before pivoting to authorization, he’s agreeing with the administration’s stated premise for the war. He’s just disagreeing about whether the president needed to ask permission first. To anyone listening casually, the Democratic position sounds like: we agree that something needs to be done, we just wish you’d asked us first. That’s not what three out of every four Democratic voters think. They oppose the war. But their elected representatives are so afraid of being sorted into the wrong side of the binary that they lead with concessions designed to preempt the accusation. And in doing so, they accept the frame. “Iran is terrible, but” isn’t going to stop Trump and guys like Thiessen from calling Democrats traitors, anyway.
And they’re covering for a justification that barely holds together. Trump claimed Iran’s missiles could “soon reach the American homeland.” His own Defense Intelligence Agency’s 2025 assessment said that capability was a decade away at the earliest. He claimed he’d “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program in June 2025. Eight months later, the threat was somehow urgent enough for a full-scale war. Every second spent on “Iran is bad, but” is a second not spent on “the president’s stated justification contradicts his own intelligence agencies.” The whole point is to make sure nobody talks about the substance.
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What 27 percent tells you
Here’s the thing about this war that makes it different from the ones that came before it: the public isn’t behind it. Not even close.
Reuters/Ipsos put approval at 27 percent over the first weekend of strikes. YouGov had it at 35. Afghanistan started at 92 percent. Iraq started at 71. And as G. Elliott Morris writes, the rally-around-the-flag bump that has accompanied every American military action going back to World War II basically didn’t happen. These are the good numbers. This is day one, before the first American service members were killed, before gas prices spiked, before any of the things that typically erode support had even started.
Trump, asked about the numbers in a New York Post interview on Monday, had thoughts: “I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing.” And then: “I think people are very impressed with what is happening, actually. I think it’s a silent, if you did a real poll, the silent poll, and it’s like a silent majority.”
Sure thing, Don.
Democrats who actually oppose this war (and not all of them do; Moskowitz and Fetterman clearly support it in at least some capacity) have never had a better opening. In 2001, opposing the war in Afghanistan meant going against 92 percent of the country! In 2003, opposing Iraq meant going against nearly three-quarters. Politicians who opposed the war paid a huge political price. The “whose side are you on” framework was effective in part because the public really was on one side. Opposing the war meant opposing the consensus, and the framework turned that into opposing the troops, opposing the country.
That’s not what’s happening here. The public already opposes this war. The lane is wide open. And if Democrats don’t fill it, they’re betting that someone else will, or worse, that the lane will stay open forever. It won’t. The whole point of “whose side are you on” is to close it. To keep repeating the binary until people accept it, until the silence starts to look like agreement, until enough people conclude that something must have been necessary because few in power were saying otherwise.
The country isn’t where it was in 2001 or 2003. The framework is. And right now, the question isn’t whether “whose side are you on” will keep getting asked. It will. This time and the time after that, and the time after that. The question is whether people in positions of power are going to say, clearly and without a loyalty disclaimer, that this war is wrong. The public is already there. I think they’re waiting for someone to say it out loud.
Parker, I love how you manage to write these pieces that feel on some level, to people like me, *extremely obvious*, but you bring the receipts and put everything in perspective. Well done, once again.
Schumer and Jeffries are useless and Dems as a whole again are not rising to the moment. We need new leadership ASAP because this tired rerun should NOT work anymore!