Joseph Geevarghese: Democrats Who Fund Trump’s War Should Expect Primaries
By Joseph Geevarghese
In the opening days of President Trump’s war with Iran, many Democrats struck the right tone. They warned that Trump could not drag the country into another costly war without congressional oversight and backed legislation invoking the War Powers Act to constrain the administration’s authority.
But the question now is whether that opposition was about style or substance.
Was it merely a procedural objection about how the war began or a moral objection to the war itself?
Congress will soon answer that question when it votes on whether to fund the war. And for Democrats, that vote will determine whether the party intends to function as real opposition or simply speak out against Trump’s war while simultaneously financing it.
Opposing a war rhetorically while voting to bankroll it is not opposition. It is performance.
Across the Democratic base, patience with that performance is already wearing thin. And that frustration is already shaping the early contours of Democratic primaries and the broader electoral cycle.
In Illinois’s heated Democratic Senate primary, Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton and Rep. Robin Kelly pledged during a televised debate that they would oppose additional funding for Trump’s war in Iran. In Hawaii, a Democratic challenger is pressing Rep. Ed Case to take the same position, reminding voters that after supporting the Iraq War, he now has “a chance to get it right.”
These are not isolated moments. They are signals of a larger shift across the Democratic Party’s grassroots and its electorate.
For voters, this comes down to a simple test: if you oppose the war, don’t fund it.
Polling already shows that public opinion is turning against the war, particularly among independents who often decide national elections. That should present a political opportunity for a party eager to define itself as a genuine alternative to Trumpism.
But that opportunity will evaporate quickly if Democrats retreat into procedural objections while continuing to fund the war itself.
The cost alone should force a moment of reckoning.
In a closed-door briefing this week, Pentagon officials told senators that the first six days of the Iran war cost more than $11 billion.
Six days. Eleven billion dollars.
At a time when voters are struggling with rising rents, crushing health care bills and stagnant wages, Washington suddenly has limitless funds for war while claiming there is no money to raise wages, lower housing costs or expand health care.
That contradiction is impossible to ignore.
After two decades of catastrophic wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans have grown deeply skeptical of military adventurism and the political interests that sustain it. Voters today are far more concerned with affordability and economic stability than another open-ended conflict abroad.
Meanwhile, the military industrial complex is thriving.
Within days of the first strikes, the stock prices of major defense contractors surged as investors anticipated expanded weapons production and new Pentagon contracts. Companies like Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman stand to reap billions from a prolonged war.
Long before Big Tech monopolies and private equity landlords became symbols of modern oligarchy, the military-industrial complex perfected the model of extracting public wealth through permanent conflict.
President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans about this danger in his 1961 farewell address, cautioning the nation to guard against the “unwarranted influence” of a permanent military establishment intertwined with powerful contractors.
More than sixty years later, that warning feels prophetic.
In his own farewell address last year, President Joe Biden warned that the United States now faces “a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” an emerging oligarchy capable of distorting democracy itself.
War has always been one of the oldest engines of that oligarchic power.
For months now, Democrats have attempted to present themselves as a unified opposition to Trump’s economic policies and increasingly authoritarian politics. In many respects, that unity has been welcome. The country needs a credible counterweight to the MAGA agenda.
But unity is not measured by press releases.
It is measured by votes.
Democrats who claim to oppose Trump’s war but ultimately vote to fund it should expect primary challenges. That is not a threat. It is a political reality.
Across the country, a growing anti-oligarchy sentiment is animating the Democratic base and driving the energy of the party’s voters. They want a Democratic Party that confronts the concentration of wealth and power shaping American politics, not one that quietly accommodates it. And they increasingly want a party that is willing to stand as a true opposition when the stakes demand it.
Votes like this define political parties. And for Democrats, the vote to fund Trump’s war will answer a simple question: Will they oppose the war in words or will they oppose it in power?
Because voters are paying attention. And those who choose the former should not be surprised if they soon find themselves looking over their shoulder in a primary.
Joseph Geevarghese is the executive director of Our Revolution, the grassroots political organization born out of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign.
