The people of Iran beat Donald Trump before the voters did. Eight months of resistance to the Pentagon’s bombs turned the war Trump launched on Feb. 28, 2026, into the worst strategic defeat the United States empire has ever suffered. And the defeat followed him home.
On Nov. 3, Trump’s party lost control of both the House and the Senate. Vice President JD Vance posted the explanation on Nov. 4: “The reason we lost is the war.” Trump admitted Iran was “a piece” of it, then said the war would go on.
Trump went to war for regime change in Tehran, on behalf of the Wall Street banks, oil monopolies and arms makers whose profits ride on United States control of the world’s energy. The United States and Israel, its forward base in West Asia, bombed Iranian cities and schools. On the first day, 168 people died when a United States strike hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab. The Pentagon expected Iran to surrender.
Instead, Iran took control of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage that carries about a fifth of the world’s oil, and hit back at the United States bases in the Gulf and the monarchies that host them and rule at the Pentagon’s pleasure. By June, even Foreign Policy, the magazine of the foreign-policy establishment, ran an essay calling the war a bigger defeat than Vietnam.
Trump never bothered to sell this war at home. He expected a quick win that would make him look strong and help lock in the billionaires’ offensive at home: National Guard troops sent into Los Angeles, Washington and Chicago, ICE raids on migrant workers, students jailed or deported for protesting the genocide in Gaza, attacks on trans people, the defunding of Planned Parenthood.
Instead, the war landed in working people’s gas tanks. Gas went up more than a dollar a gallon after February, and diesel twice that, driving up the price of everything that moves by truck. A majority opposed the war from the start. By fall, nearly two in three did.
The Democrats had no part in this victory. When the bombs fell on Feb. 28, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries objected only that Trump had gone to war without authorization from Congress. Both shared Trump’s stated aims. Schumer supported Trump’s goals, and Jeffries called Iran a “bad actor” that “must be aggressively confronted.”
Jeffries is a darling of the arms makers: Lockheed Martin, RTX (the old Raytheon), Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics each gave his 2026 campaign the legal maximum. Wall Street gave him even more.
The Democrats will hold hearings in January. The war goes on.
The vote against Trump was made in the streets, by people who had been fighting ICE and the war for months. It was made possible by a people half a world away who would not give up.
Workers in the United States have been here before. The Vietnamese resistance did more than free Vietnam. It broke the draft, set off rebellion inside the ranks of the United States Army and drove the war government’s own students into the streets. Every defeat the United States ruling class suffers abroad weakens its hand against workers at home. Frederick Douglass said it in 1883: “No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
Trump’s answer to his defeat is Stephen Miller, the architect of the deportation machine, installed as White House chief of staff on Nov. 9. The war on Iran and the war at home are run from the same office, for the same billionaire class. The people of Iran have shown that the first one can be beaten. For that, workers in the United States owe them thanks.
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