Democrats denounce Trump’s Iran attack, but subtle divisions emerge.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington about the failed indictment against him for his fall video about illegal military orders, Feb. 11, 2026. Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran without seeking congressional approval — but in significant if subtle ways, the attacks have magnified fissures in the party over the country’s national security interests and America’s use of military force in the Middle East. (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

By LISA LERER and KATIE GLUECK

Democrats have overwhelmingly opposed President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran without seeking congressional approval. But in significant if subtle ways, the attacks have magnified fissures in the party over the country’s national security interests and America’s use of military force in the Middle East.

The questions many Democrats are raising over whether Trump was justified in launching the attacks deepened Sunday after the first American casualties were announced by the Pentagon.

Yet even as they prepared to return to Washington to debate a military attack that could incite a broader conflict, tensions were emerging within the party over how stridently to oppose Trump’s use of force to achieve regime change and limit Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear arms.

And a small handful of Democrats, including some of the party’s strongest supporters of Israel, which conducted strikes alongside the U.S., have backed the administration’s operation.

The disagreements reveal a Democratic Party still searching for direction after its devastating defeat in the 2024 election. On issues from taxes to immigration to Israel, the party is remaking its views in real time, as Democratic lawmakers react to Trump’s aggressive use of executive power.

“We need to take a very firm, ‘hell no’ approach and not equivocate on it or suggest that some drawn out process would in any way justify what he’s trying to do,” said Rep. Eric Swalwell, who is running for governor of California in a crowded primary. “In no world do I see this being acceptable for our values,” he said.

Swalwell reacted — like many in his party — to the strikes on Iran with furious opposition, accusing Trump of risking the lives of American service members without presenting evidence that America’s security was at risk.

But others took a more tempered approach, showing continued support for the decades-old bipartisan consensus that Iran poses a threat to American national security and should not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.

They criticized the administration for launching strikes without consulting Congress, while also casting the Iranian regime as a uniquely dangerous actor responsible for the deaths of Americans and its own citizens.

“We can’t allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon,” Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press” on Sunday. But, he added, “this administration, my sense is that they did not go into this with any kind of strategic plan. It was an operation with no discussion about what comes next.”

Republicans, too, have been navigating internal political divides over the military attack, with a handful of prominent MAGA figures arguing that Trump has betrayed his promise to pull the nation back from foreign wars. The president, who did not appear in public Sunday, made little effort before the attack to lay out the case for a military assault against Iran. Trump said in a video released Saturday that his objective was “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”

As the attack injected another unpredictable element into an unsettled and volatile political environment, potential contenders for the party’s next presidential nomination offered a range of responses to the still-evolving conflict.

Some Democrats, including Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, criticized the repressiveness of the Iranian regime and insisted in the hours after the attack that it must not be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons, even as they slammed Trump’s approach, saying it endangered Americans and undermined the country’s national security interests.

But another group, including Rep. Ro Khanna of California, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive from New York, kept their focus squarely on Trump. Ocasio-Cortez charged in a statement that the president made “a deliberate choice of aggression when diplomacy and security were within reach,” accusing him of lying to the nation.

Such crosscurrents in the party date back more than two decades to the war in Iraq, when Democrats fractured over whether to authorize the invasion in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Now, a number of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Senate candidate Graham Platner in Maine, have referenced their service during those conflicts as they express their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.

Gallego recounted the fear his mother felt when he was serving as a Marine in Iraq, an experience that he said left him struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome for years.

“There’s nothing worse than seeing your friends die for a cause that is not in the national interest of this country,” Gallego said in an interview with CNN broadcast Sunday. “There is no leadership right now that’s coming from this president, and we’re in the middle of dropping bombs right now, and men and women are dying.”

Some strategists argued that the politics favor that kind of fierce opposition over the more cautious approach congressional Democratic leadership has taken.

“It’s very obvious to me that the hemming and hawing here around a haphazard regime-change war from a president at 38% approval rating is just nuts,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who served as a top adviser to Obama and now cohosts “Pod Save America,” a liberal podcast. “People didn’t vote for it. They don’t want it. They don’t trust the guy executing it. It could not be more disconnected from the things they care about.”

Polls conducted before the assault indicated that a majority of Americans opposed the United States initiating a strike on Iran. But it’s unclear how they will react to an ongoing operation that resulted both in the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader for decades and considered an enemy of the United States, and three U.S. service members.

A small minority of Democratic lawmakers argued that regardless of the politics and their distrust of the Trump administration, the strike was in the national security interests of the U.S.

Rep. Greg Landsman of Ohio, one of a few of Democrats who defended the action in Iran, said he planned to vote against a resolution that would restrain Trump’s ability to continue the military operation.