Written by Matt Morgan, Editor at The Daily Bell.com:
Here is the clearest civics lesson you are likely to get this year.
The president delivered it himself.
That’s because he thinks that launching a war against Iran without a vote in Congress is, in Donald Trump’s telling, patriotic leadership. While voting to bring that same war to an end, using the one power the Constitution hands Congress in plain words, is unpatriotic.
The framers gave Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. They did it on purpose. During the formation of the US Constitution, Madison thought the executive branch was most interested in war and most prone to it, so they put the decision somewhere harder for one man to reach. On Wednesday the House reached for it anyway, voting 215 to 208 to direct the President to wind down a war he started on February 28 without asking. Four Republicans joined in and then Trump called them traitors.
Antiwar.com reports:
Trump Denounces House Lawmakers as ‘Unpatriotic’ for Passing Resolution To End His War With Iran
The bill passed on Wednesday in a vote of 215-208, with four Republicans voting in favor
by Dave DeCamp | June 4, 2026 | Iran
President Trump on Thursday attacked House lawmakers as “unpatriotic” for passing a War Powers Resolution that would direct him to end the war with Iran, which he launched with Israel without congressional authorization, in violation of the US Constitution.
The bill passed on Wednesday in a vote of 215 to 208, with four Republicans joining Democrats in support of the effort. The resolution now heads to the Senate, where it has a chance of passing since the upper chamber advanced a similar War Powers Resolution last month. The bill is a concurrent resolution, meaning the president cannot veto it.
“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. Who would do such an unpatriotic thing,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
“They know where the negotiations stand. The Democrats are fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome. They would rather have our Country fail than give me another, of many, victories. The four Republicans, that’s a whole other story – They’re GRANDSTANDERS! They should be ashamed of themselves. MAGA!!!” the president added.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the only House Republican to support all four attempts to pass an Iran War Powers Resolution, responded to Trump in a post on X, writing, “Sir, we have Trump disappointment syndrome. When you said no new wars, we took it to heart, and a few of us meant it.”
The power to declare war was placed in Congress to be the great brake on exactly this, a single executive deciding on his own to put the country into a fight. By ignoring the brake, Trump gets to define patriotism. The handful of legislators who tried to use it get called grandstanders. Because in Trump’s mind, starting the war alone is leadership. Voting to stop it is betrayal.
So, instead of loyalty to the Republican ideal against the monopoly of power, the instrument designed to restrain war has become a loyalty test. You fail if you stand for American’s constitutional rights.
Don’t mistake this for a story about a Constitution that would work if only people respected it. Trump’s time had already run out….
Under the War Powers Act the President had sixty days to win authorization or stop, and as one of the Republicans who broke ranks pointed out, that deadline came and went long before this vote. The law was broken first. And nothing happened.
As Murray Rothbard argued decades ago, the state is the institution with a near-monopoly on violence inside its territory, and war is its most dependable engine of growth. Every emergency expands it. Every expansion outlives the emergency. The Republicans defending unilateral war powers today, because the man holding them is theirs, are not protecting a principle. They are oiling a machine. The presidency is not Donald Trump’s personal property. It passes to the next occupant with every precedent intact, and the next president who wants a war he was told not to start will point straight at this one. The ratchet only turns one way.
Meanwhile the bill lands where it always lands. It shows up at the gas pump, at the diesel pump, on the fertilizer invoice, and eventually at funerals, charged to people who were never asked. One man’s “final negotiations” are another family’s strained budget and another soldier’s deployment. That is the price of letting the war power collapse into a single office, and no post on Truth Social changes the arithmetic, but Massie put a price on it.
Days before this vote, responding to reports of a rift between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, he wrote on X:
It’s all talk. Just withhold foreign aid to Israel for a month and they’ll stop bombing their neighbors – instant peace, the Strait of Hormuz can be opened, and gas drops $2 a gallon. Israel has been, and continues to be, the biggest welfare recipient from American tax payers. https://t.co/VzAQYbMIpO
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) June 2, 2026
Massie is a rare figure willing to say the obvious inside his own party. Told he suffers from Trump derangement syndrome, he answered that what he actually has is Trump disappointment syndrome:
The president promised no new wars, and a few people took him at his word. But here we are, those who want to keep the promises Trump made himself are being called unpatriotic…
The House voted to end the war on Wednesday…
Today the war is still on, and the President was busy explaining that the vote meant nothing and the people behind it were traitors. Both halves of that sentence are true, and only one of them matters.
