In an interview with The New York Times last week, Tucker Carlson, once a Trump stalwart, called President Trump’s war with Iran “the single most foolish thing any American president has ever done.” The conservative podcaster no doubt was being intentionally hyperbolic, as his followers expect; it’s hard to argue that this military misadventure already qualifies as a more foolish decision than those that led to the Vietnam and Iraq wars. But Carlson, emphasizing his moral opposition to the war, contended that the administration had been pressured into it by Israel and argued that it would hurt U.S. interests for generations to come—and on those points, he’s correct.
Carlson isn’t the only one on the right speaking this way. Before he was killed, Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk warned Trump against war in Iran and was critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On the more normie side of MAGA world, podcaster Theo Von has been speaking out against the war with Iran, often with visible emotion and distress at the killing of children there. No matter what you think of these characters otherwise—and Carlson is a loathsome scoundrel, to be clear—the crescendo of voices like theirs on the right should serve as a warning to the Democratic Party not to ignore or sideline its own antiwar leaders.
After all, Carlson’s antiwar opinions are shared by many across the political spectrum. Multiple recent polls have found that the Iran war is just as unpopular as the nadirs of the Iraq and the Vietnam wars, with around 60 percent of Americans saying the decision to use military force was a mistake—including one in five Republicans. Relatedly, Israel’s war against Gaza has caused a historically significant shift: More Americans now view Israel unfavorably than favorably, including 57 percent of Republican voters under age 49.
“The real remaining strong pro-Israel constituency is over-50 Republicans,” Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, told The Washington Post this week. “That’s not a durable political coalition.”
Despite this, leading Democrats are dithering. If opposition to this war, and to all wars driven primarily by our relationship with Israel, doesn’t quickly become central to Democratic messaging, we can expect Carlson—or someone very much like him, such as former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene—to emerge as the antiwar candidate in the 2028 presidential election.
There’s a clear hunger among the Democratic base for a dramatic change in foreign policy. Four in five Democratic voters disapprove of Israel, while more than 90 percent oppose the Iran war. So it’s no surprise that candidates who firmly denounce war and refuse money from AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying organization, are attracting support partly on that basis. Graham Platner, an antiwar and anti-genocide oyster farmer, is the presumptive Democratic nominee in Maine’s Senate race. In Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate, Abdul Al-Sayed, a staunch Israel critic, is running neck and neck with Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel congresswoman, and state Senator Mallory McMorrow, who eventually came around to rejecting AIPAC and accusing Israel of genocide.
But the party leadership has not been meeting the moment. In late February, as Trump made daily threats to bomb Iran, Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee reportedly tried to delay a vote on a war powers resolution. “The preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats, according to a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, is that Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms,” reported Capital & Empire’s Aída Chávez, who cites sources saying that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was not whipping votes for the resolution. Four days after that article, Trump launched his war.
Schumer and Jeffries have since criticized it, of course, and backed efforts to pass a war powers resolution. They might call this “leading from behind,” but it looks more like belatedly jumping on the bandwagon. After all, both of them were supportive of Trump’s bombing of Iran last summer. Several weeks prior, Schumer even taunted Trump for not bombing Iran hastily enough.
In fact, Schumer has a history of jonesing for this conflict. Back in 2015, he criticized the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Obama’s landmark deal with Iran, for allegedly not doing enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions. In announcing his “no” vote, Schumer wrote that “there is a strong case that we are better off without an agreement than with one.” Trump agreed, and promptly ripped up the deal during his first term. Fast-forward to today, and Trump is now attempting to convince Iran to sign a deal similar to the JCPOA—after spending tens of billions of dollars and killing thousands of people.
Schumer deserves a share of blame for that outcome. And of course he remains a staunch ally of Israel, despite its genocide in Gaza: He was not among the record number of Senate Democrats who voted last month to block arms sales to the country.
These leaders represent the tired quiescence of the Democratic Party to the American war machine—essentially the same argument Carlson is making about the Republican Party—which makes it hard for them to capitalize on Trump’s disastrous mistake with convincing moral fervor.
Even worse, they’ve been slow to embrace their own party’s antiwar candidates. Schumer, brilliant talent scout that he is, recruited Maine Governor Janet Mills to run for Senate against Republican Susan Collins and supported her against Platner. (Mills failed to compete in polls and fundraising, and dropped out last week, at which point Schumer endorsed Platner.) In the Michigan race, Schumer endorsed Stevens, who was booed for being too pro-Israel at the Michigan Democratic Convention last month.
The views represented by Schumer and his fellow centrists must not be allowed to prevail in the party in 2028. Democrats have already lost one presidential election for being too supportive of Israel and war: In 2024, voters punished Kamala Harris for the Biden administration’s role in Israel’s genocide. According to polling from the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, Gaza was the number one issue for Biden 2020 voters who voted for someone other than Harris in 2024. Many of them voted for Trump, believing, as Carlson did, that he was genuinely antiwar, while those who couldn’t stomach voting for Trump simply stayed home.
Yet the Democratic establishment is still trying to suppress obvious truths. The Democratic National Committee is refusing to release an autopsy of the 2024 election that shows what even Harris herself, in her campaign memoir, has acknowledged: that Gaza was an important factor in her defeat. Just a couple days ago, DNC Chair Ken Martin was still making lame and incomprehensible excuses for keeping the report under wraps, even as Harris reportedly tells donors that the DNC should release it.
That election demonstrated that voters will punish the incumbent party for unjustifiable wars. Trump’s war with Iran and his failure to rein in Israel in Gaza are huge liabilities for the Republican Party, in the midterms and in 2028. But we shouldn’t underestimate the Democrats’ capacity to compete with Trump in turning Iran and Israel into losing issues for themselves. If the leadership—and donors—successfully push an insufficiently antiwar nominee, an Israel hawk like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, for example, or a milquetoast candidate unable to articulate a clear critique of either Biden or Trump policy, like Kamala Harris or outgoing California Governor Gavin Newsom, voters may look elsewhere.
You do not have to hand it to Tucker Carlson for his recent critiques. You don’t even have to listen to him. But Democratic leadership should take the full-throated antiwar sentiment on the right as a warning to heed their own party’s antiwar voices. Otherwise, they may indeed be handing Carlson and his fellow antiwar rightists something more significant: our future.