The Trump administration has for the second time in just a few weeks attempted the decapitation of an enemy regime, killing Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and some uncertain number of the Islamic Republic’s leadership in a series of airstrikes this past weekend. The attacks are ongoing.

Like nearly everything else the administration does, the operation is illegal and immoral. It was conducted without any notice to Congress, let alone congressional approval. Some strikes hit an all-girls elementary school, killing dozens of children. 

The official justification for the strikes is unclear. Trump at some points cited Iran’s nuclear program, although he claimed to have completely destroyed the program with airstrikes last summer. He also hinted at a regime change justification, although, similar to the operation to capture Nicolás Maduro, there doesn’t appear to be any succession plan in place. He mentioned an imminent threat from Iran, though that appears to be a lie. He also cited allegations of Iranian interference in the 2020 and 2024 elections, which we can safely assume is simply made up.  

We don’t know how much this might escalate because we don’t know what Trump actually wants, other than to feel strong and watch things blow up on a little screen. Certainly he has no interest in nation-building, and even if he did he’s not competent enough to do it. It’s possible that he is attempting to rally national morale and boost his approval ratings, à la Mussolini’s foray into Ethiopia. But that gets the political causation a bit mixed up. It’s not simply that war rallies the nation, it’s that the nation is rallied into war: the rallying is the point. But we have not been rallied.

Trump has at times famously been cast as a dove by the media, an image that he fostered back in 2015 when he was one of the few Republicans to criticize the Iraq War. Of course, his actual criticism of the war was that the whole ordeal was insufficiently cynical. We should have simply taken the oil, he said. His concern wasn’t the human toll of the conflict, it was the trappings of liberal internationalism: the nation-building, the coalition of the willing. This was all, to his mind, bullshit. War is an exercise in domination. We should have simply killed our enemies and taken their shit. 

So while it’s undoubtedly true that Trump’s portrayal as a dove was dishonest, in many ways this is the world he promised. It’s one of unfiltered cynicism, with demonstrations of violence and domination stripped of all formality and pretext. 

Where are the Democrats in all this? Senator Chuck Schumer, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, put out this statement:

It’s hard to express how pathetic this statement is. Schumer seems to be saying that the problem here is a lack of explanation, as if there could be some lurking justification for a power-drunk moron’s war of aggression and he just needs to fill us in.

Of course, it’s hard for someone like Schumer to criticize Trump’s actions with any moral force. He’s said that Iran is the “leading state sponsor of terrorism,” a “brutal, theocratic dictatorship” that poses an “existential threat” to Israel. It’s hard to meaningfully criticize military action against Iran when everything you’ve said to this point makes military action seem like a necessity.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a similar statement. Here’s the material bit:

This, too, is entirely a procedural objection. The Iranian regime is deeply evil and dangerous, but Trump should’ve asked Congress first. Heavily implied by their statements is that both Schumer and Jeffries would have voted to approve military action had Trump properly requested it. They just wanted the courtesy of him asking.

I am loath to become one of those people who responds to Trump’s actions exclusively with criticisms of the Democratic Party. But part of Trump’s success is explained by the Democrats’ vacuousness.

Michael Mann, the (occasionally controversial) sociologist, described liberal democracy as “antiheroic.” “Liberal and social democracies,” he said, ”recognize no monopoly of virtue, no absolute truth.” Liberal politics, in other words, is inherently compromising. It often subjugates morality to process and negotiation. Fascism steps into that void, confidently declaring its claim to moral authority. It’s liberalism’s feckless proceduralism that creates space for fascism to thrive.

Schumer and Jeffries are crying for more procedure, but the lack of the procedure is the point. Fascists cast it aside for its weakness. Prominent Democrats have been castigating the Islamic Republic as a dangerous threat for decades; Trump is simply manifesting their rhetoric into reality. He is offering a purer form of their own politics.

Trump’s disposal of proper procedure is dangerous, but if it’s the focus of our opposition then there is no countervailing moral argument. It calcifies Trump’s claim to moral authority. Chuck Schumer and his ilk have publicly hoped that the Iranian people would be freed from their government, but their prescriptions were a hedging mish mash of tough talk and feeble diplomatic tactics. Trump, by openly trying to topple the government, has synthesized their arguments. He can claim to be a more effective version of them, and what grounds do they have to say that he’s wrong?

I will add one last thought. Many of the responses from Democratic lawmakers and liberal commentators (even the good ones) contain some ambivalence - some hope that perhaps the fall of the Iranian regime, even at the hands of Donald Trump, will be for the best. I understand why. I am the son of an Iranian immigrant. Ultimately I want freedom, democracy, and dignity for the Iranian people. The problem is that I’ve seen the American government promise all of those things a hundred times, and I’ve never seen them deliver it once.