Donald Trump suffered a significant setback last week. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a measure under the 1973 War Powers Resolution. It directed the White House “to remove all U.S. forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”. This occurred several weeks after the U.S. Senate voted 50-47 to advance its own version of the bill. (A final vote has yet to be scheduled.) Unlike previous failed attempts, both votes won support from some Republican lawmakers.
Trump was predictably irate. “Yesterday, in a meaningless vote, the House voted, 4 bad Republicans and all of the Dumocrats, to limit my War Powers, right in the middle of my final negotiations to end the War with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote in a June 4 Truth Social post. “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing. [sic]”
This isn’t the first time Trump has excoriated rebels in his party on a foreign policy issue. When five Republican senators voted in January to proceed on a motion to limit Trump’s authority to order military strikes in Venezuela without congressional approval, he named the defectors publicly and declared that “they should never be elected to office again.” The pressure worked; two of them flipped, helping the administration to kill the effort.
Trump’s intimidation tactics won’t work this time. The snatch-and-grab operation against the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro lasted a few hours and no American troops were killed. By contrast, the war in Iran has been an own goal of epic proportions.
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