When President Donald Trump announced a two-week ceasefire Tuesday night, Democrats didn’t rush to slam the agreement.
Many were just too relieved to say anything at all.
Even though Trump was essentially touting an offer Iran had made weeks ago that, according to experts, doesn’t achieve Trump’s stated objectives and actually reinforces Iran’s stranglehold over the Strait of Hormuz, Democrats restrained themselves.
The normal rush to point out that “Trump Always Chickens Out” — on a Tuesday, no less — was met more with silence than memes.
As Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., pointed out online, this wasn’t the time for jokes.
“I do not appreciate anyone — Democrat or Republican — taking this moment to make TACO jokes to say Trump ‘chickened out,’” wrote Ansari, the first Iranian-American Democrat in Congress.
She reminded readers that the president was threatening genocide against “a whole civilization” — 90 million people — and she said she was grateful there’s a ceasefire and that “scores of innocent people didn’t die tonight.”
Other Democrats echoed Ansari’s sentiment, stressing the extraordinary threat the president had made.
“When it comes to war and peace, I just don’t think of this in political terms,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told MS NOW.
“I don’t think anyone should,” she said.
Rep. Sarah McBride, D-Del., expressed a similar thought. “There is nothing celebratory or humorous about the tragic situation that we find ourselves in, that the Iranian people find themselves in,” she said.
And one House Democrat, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the political dynamics, noted that polling about the war and the Trump administration writ large is already bad enough. There’s no need to pile on, given the gravity of what had — at least for the moment — been averted.
“We don’t need extra victory laps,” the Democratic lawmaker told MS NOW. “We have enough victories out there.”
“You don’t have to win every single battle to win the war,” that lawmaker said.
That doesn’t mean Democrats are necessarily praising the president for pulling the U.S. back from the brink or casting him as some strategic tactician who knows the art of the deal.
In fact, Democrats are aware that — if the roles were reversed and a Democratic president had arranged this ceasefire — there’s little doubt Trump would be slamming the agreement. Trump was one of the most forceful voices opposing President Barack Obama’s Iran deal in 2015 and 2016. Getting back to that agreement now would be a major diplomatic achievement for the U.S.
The new agreement, according to Trump, was contingent on Iran agreeing to “the COMPLETE, IMMEDIATE, and SAFE OPENING of the Strait of Hormuz” — the closure of which has, in recent weeks, spurred a dramatic rise in the cost of oil.
So far, that part of the bargain isn’t holding up, with Iran maintaining operational control of the strait on Wednesday and even closing it after Israel continued attacks on Lebanon.
Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., told MS NOW there’s no doubt Trump would be “trashing” the ceasefire if it were Democrats who had struck the deal.
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Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also invoked the Obama-era deal. “From what I’m hearing thus far — we’ve got to hear more — it’s going to be less than what we got out of the JCPOA,” Meeks said, referring to the Iran deal and its official acronym.
“I hear my Republican colleagues praising this,” Meeks said. “It seems somewhat hypocritical to me.”
And Jacobs said, “The fact that you have this ceasefire deal that, frankly, is not very good for the United States, just goes to show why we should have never started this war to begin with.”
Of course, some Democrats suggested on Wednesday to MS NOW that the messaging is tricky.
“We need to be for the ceasefire. Of course, we shouldn’t be for war,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.
“But,” he told MS NOW, “we should point out that the world was safer before Donald Trump took on this ill conceived, illegal war.”
McBride said if Trump weren’t currently president, he “would be rightfully criticizing this deal, denouncing this deal, and calling out whatever president had taken the United States into another quagmire in the Middle East.”
She noted that, if Iran maintains the ability to toll boats passing through the strait, it means that — because the oil market is global — “every time Americans go to the gas pump, part of their money will be going toward rebuilding what the U.S. military destroyed in Iran.”
There are a lot of unanswered questions about what exactly is in the deal itself.
“Nobody really knows what’s happening,” Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, told MS NOW. “And that’s entirely because of the chaos of Donald Trump.”
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., a senior House Democrat who has served in Congress since 1997, said the ceasefire “doesn’t at all diminish my concerns about his mental stability and about how erratic his policy has been and about how dangerous it’s been.”
McGovern said he’s choosing his words carefully.
“I’m not going to call him chicken for backing down, I’m just relieved for the world that he backed out,” he said. “I’m not going to call him TACO; I may call him insane.”
Maya Eaglin contributed to this report.
Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.
Mychael Schnell is a reporter for MS NOW.