The Paradox of Trump’s Iran Attack

President Trump has launched a war that offers opportunities to the Middle East and threatens constitutional freedom at home. American service members are bravely risking their lives to protect their country from nuclear dangers—and to restore freedom to the Iranian people who have sacrificed so much to reclaim that freedom for themselves. The instinct to rally around the flag is, and should be, strong. It’s also urgent to rally around the principles and ideals for which the flag stands.

The opportunity: Iranians rose against their own government by the millions. They died by the tens of thousands. They lacked the strength to liberate themselves. Those Iranians able to communicate to the outside world have begged for help against their oppressors and murderers. Trump promised that help. Now he is delivering it. A tyrannical regime that has been at war for almost half a century against its own people, against its neighbors, and against the United States is suffering the retribution it provoked by its own unceasing aggression and repression. The rulers of Iran have committed outrage after outrage against the rest of the world and their own people. They sought nuclear weapons to commit a second Holocaust against Israel, as they repeatedly and expressly threatened. The outcome of the U.S.-Israel war against the Iranian regime is obviously extremely uncertain. But we can glimpse the possibility of an Iran that is no longer misgoverned by theocratic and genocidal terrorists—and all that that could mean for peace in the region, for U.S. security, and for the freedom, prosperity, and progress of the Iranian people.

The danger: The war is being made by a president who has repeatedly shown his contempt for law and free elections—enabled by a tiny congressional majority that seems to see its job as Trump’s co-conspirator against the Constitution. Trump taxed without Congress, disbursed funds to farmers without Congress, took a stake in private corporations without Congress, brazenly broke anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws despite Congress, tried to send members of Congress to prison for making a video reminding members of their duty to obey the law. Now Trump has started what could be a huge and expensive regional war without even a figment of congressional authorization. War empowers presidents. No president in American history has shown himself less trustworthy with power than Donald Trump.

The danger continued: Trump has governed by setting Americans against Americans. A week before starting his big war, he denounced the U.S. Supreme Court—or six of its members, anyway—as being under the sway of foreign powers because it found he imposed tariffs illegally. Two days before starting his big war, he delivered a nearly two-hour speech to Congress speckled with insults and stunts to demonstrate to the world his lack of respect for half the country—and by now, much more than half. Federal agencies are still occupying U.S. cities, where they have made arrests without due process and killed U.S. citizens without accountability. Trump has invoked emergency powers of all kinds when there was no justification for them. Some of his supporters are circulating a plan to use emergency powers to seize presidential control of the 2026 congressional elections his party would likely badly lose if those elections were free and fair. Now there’s a genuine military emergency at hand of a kind that federal courts have historically deferred to. It’s frightening to imagine the sinister domestic use that Trump will make of these powers—especially if Trump’s war lasts long.

So far in his presidency, Trump has deployed force in brief bursts, obscured from view: last summer’s air strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, the raid to abduct the Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, the blowing up of boats said to be carrying drugs. He may hope that this new war will follow the pattern. But it may not. Once the Iranian regime’s military assets and command structures are battered, then what? What if the regime doesn’t fall by itself? Does Trump accept failure and try to spin it as success? Or does he try to mobilize more resources, all without regard to law, Congress, and U.S. public opinion?

You don’t go bankrupt as often as Trump has gone bankrupt if you’re good at assessing risk. Trump tells ridiculous fantasies presumably because he believes ridiculous fantasies. In his second administration, he has surrounded himself with sycophants who validate his ridiculous fantasies. When his fantasies unravel, Trump has a habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world. When the Federal Reserve does not rescue him from his economic mismanagement, he orders his Department of Justice to open criminal investigations into a Federal Reserve governor and the chairman himself. If an actual shooting war goes amiss—takes too long, fails to yield the cheap and easy success Trump craves—what follows at home may exceed all past abuses of power.

To paraphrase a saying from America’s previous big war: You don’t go to war with the president you want. You go to war with the aspiring autocrat you have. Some of Trump’s moves to second-term autocracy have been thwarted. Trump’s March 2025 executive order purporting to grab presidential control of state elections has been dismantled by the courts. His tariffs to create a revenue source under his personal control have been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Public outrage compelled him to jettison the most violent tactics used by his immigration-enforcement agents.

Now, however, Trump has a much more open field to try new autocratic methods. His majority in Congress remains complicit. The courts tend to go quiet in wartime. The only restraint will be public opinion. The trouble there is that those parts of the public who will be heard first and loudest are precisely those least interested—or actively opposed—to garnering the opportunity that opened this warning. A free Iran and a free United States: Americans should seek both. If we can get to a free Iran fast, Trump’s plot against American freedom will have less scope to operate. If the war to free Iran falters or slows, the attack on free institutions at home may expand and accelerate.

The ideal palliative would be for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to act, for a change, like the independent constitutional officers they are supposed to be. But they have to date failed to muster the character to do the jobs they swore to do, and not even the bad polls overhanging their party prospects have yet recalled them to duty. Only if the members behind them break ranks will the sunlight of democracy shine a little, as happened with Trump’s attempted cover-up of the Epstein scandal. So the call goes out: A dozen Republican House members—even two or three senators—who remember the principles they supposedly believe is all it will take in this moment of danger and opportunity to grasp the opportunities and mitigate the dangers. Congress needs to generate oversight committees dedicated to success in the war against the brutal rulers of Iran, and protection of democracy at home from the war makers.