In one of the most unfortunate moral and strategic inversions in recent times, Democrats today seem to believe what is good for our national security is bad for the Democratic Party.

Republicans have generally supported Democratic presidents in wartime: Kosovo 1999, Libya 2011, Yemen 2024 — all commenced without congressional authorization.

Democrats have done mostly the same for Republican presidents: Iraq 1991 and 2003, Afghanistan 2001.

But with Donald Trump and Iran, things are different: Democrats are in uniform, rageful opposition. 

They hector the president daily even amid combat operations, much to the delight of the Iranian mullahs, who avidly consume US media and thrive on US division. 

Given the nature of the nuclear threat, Democrats’ arguments against the war seem largely second-order: the war lacks legal authorization and clear purpose; the strikes are spiking oil prices and inflation.

Liberal darling and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman seemed to say the silent part out loud about the liberal mindset: Though he doesn’t like the Iranian regime, he admitted, he doesn’t want to see Trump or Bibi Netanyahu getting credit for what would be a historic win for global peace.

This sounds like Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I think something far deeper is at play.

Democrats need Trump to fail in Iran — because if he succeeds, Democrats are exposed as unserious people with an unserious worldview and no coherent plan on national security that makes sense in the real world. 

For the last decade, the Democratic Party has been a party of appeasement and weakness in the face of Mideast terrorists. 

Barack Obama backed off his red-line threat in Syria in 2012. Joe Biden fled Afghanistan in a disastrous pullout in 2021. 

During their presidencies, both seemed to believe diplomacy was the only answer to every problem, even when it was clear diplomacy was failing. 

The appeasement/diplomacy-only mindset has a complex provenance: a left-wing conceit in its own persuasive skills, mutant strains of ancestral guilt, the professional class’ ideological exaltation of process over action and the delusion pushed by progressive academics that the bad guys are really “just like us” and will surely join the “global rules-based order” with the right incentives.

But to the bad guys in the region, appeasement just signals weakness. 

Obama was seen as so anxious for a diplomatic capstone that Iran was able to maneuver him into a nuclear deal in 2015 that actually allowed Tehran to further its nuclear infrastructure with critical items like advanced centrifuges. 

It also rewarded Iran with billions of dollars in cash and sanctions relief. 

Biden continued in the same vein. After initially expressing support for Israel, Biden repeatedly scolded it and demanded “de-escalation,” even as Iran was sponsoring a seven-front jihadist war against the tiny state and only pluralistic democracy in the region.

Israel vanquished both Hamas and Hezbollah because Bibi Netanyahu largely ignored the supine Biden.

But Biden also pushed for de-escalation with the Mideast terrorists because something was happening to the Democratic Party: Working-class voters were abandoning it, and only 27% of the electorate identified as Democrats.

To rebuild, Democrats increasingly welcomed more extremist elements of the left, such as the socialist-Islamist, red-green alliance that has repeatedly expressed sympathy for terrorists and their anti-Western ideology.   

The mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, dines with the leader of an organization that spreads Hamas propaganda and calls for the destruction of the West.  

A leaked audio of a campaign call with Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed revealed a plan to keep quiet about the assassination of Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad” about it.

Democrats can’t have a serious plan to deal with Iran’s nuclear terrorism because their base won’t let them — the same base that nixed the central-casting Gov. Josh Shapiro as the party’s 2024 VP choice.

Meanwhile, Trump is vanquishing the Iranian regime’s leadership and military capabilities, and judo-flipping its Hormuz gambit with a US blockade. 

Gulf states are aligning with the United States and Israel for the first time in a military conflict.

Lebanon has struck a cease-fire deal with Israel that could well lead to a long-term peace there and the elimination of Hezbollah’s terror threat.

Whereas both Biden and Obama coddled Iran, Trump appears on the verge of defeating the regime and stopping it from acquiring nuclear weapons.

That’s all good news.

But you wouldn’t know all this from the doomscrolling Democrats and their patrons in their media-industrial complex. 

Julian Epstein has served as chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats and staff director of the House Oversight Committee.