Hakeem Jeffries is a Coward on Iran—And a Coward on Trump.
The War on Iran Exposes the Crisis of the Democratic Establishment
by T.E. Moon
On February 28, the United States and Israel launched "Operation Epic Fury," a massive, coordinated military offensive targeting the Islamic Republic of Iran. This latest crime is a culmination of decades of frothing, sustained efforts to topple the theocratic and stubbornly anti-western regime. The American-Israeli imperialism has steadily ramped up since the latest escalation of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people following the October 7th attacks.
It is no surprise that Americans who oppose this murderous treachery against international solidarity and peace find themselves unrepresented in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. If you ask a socialist of any stripe: social democrats, anarchists, or communists, they will each dutifully tell you of their pitiful lack of political power.
And yet, when the nation’s largest socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), found itself in prime position to punch the Vichy Democrats square in the nose by primarying the ringmaster of the “moderate” jackals: Hakeem Jeffries, they balked. Despite this decision, it remains necessary to give the Democratic House Minority Leader a full accounting, in service to revealing the contemporary crisis facing his Party. There is no better illustration of his political character than his conduct over the course of the unfolding Iran crisis.
A Taste of Hakeem Jeffries?
On June 13th, 2025, the Israeli government escalated its multi-front war of slaughter and conquest. It launched a Pearl Harbor-style surprise attack on Iran and its allies in the Axis of Resistance. Over a thousand Iranians would die over the course of the next twelve days, as would twenty-eight Israelis.
On June 20th, a day before Trump would unilaterally and illegally join the conflict on the side of the Israelis, Hakeem Jeffries, one of two official leaders of America’s only official opposition party, issued a press release. It read, in part:
He went on to boldly stake out a stridently pro-sneak attack position, displaying a maximalist show of support for the act of aggression:
"Israel has a right to defend itself against escalating Iranian aggression, and our commitment to Israel's security remains ironclad."
He chided Donald Trump for refusing to cut him in on the action, eager as he was to spill blood for the empire:
"The authority to declare war belongs solely to the United States Congress. President Trump and his administration must refrain from engaging in offensive military action in Iran without the explicit approval of the House..."
When Trump launched "Operation Absolute Resolve" on January 3, 2026—yet another illegal and unprovoked sneak attack to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that included a devastating bombing campaign in Caracas and the deaths of dozens of Venezuelan and Cuban personnel—Jeffries' response was predictably spineless.
He immediately affirmed the administration's imperial premise, declaring Maduro a "criminal and authoritarian dictator" who "is not the legitimate head of government.” Jeffries’ primary grievance was not with the act of imperialism, but with the administrative slight that Trump "failed to properly notify Congress in advance".
This dynamic has now reached its terrifying climax with the current Iranian conflict. When the Iranian crisis first escalated in June 2025 with unauthorized U.S. strikes, progressive lawmakers like Representative Ro Khanna and conservative isolationists like Representative Thomas Massie attempted the bare minimum: introducing a War Powers Resolution and forcing the President’s allies to win the vote in Congress.
Jeffries, however, displayed a calculated hesitance. Instead of swiftly whipping his caucus to force a binding vote that would attempt to restrain the President, he slow-walked the process for months while Trump's military buildup expanded unchecked. It was not until eight months later, in late February 2026, on the absolute precipice of Operation Epic Fury, that Jeffries finally relented, meekly announcing a push to compel a War Powers vote, while still implying that he would support the venture if only the President asked:
This multi-month delay was not an oversight; it was a deliberate abdication of congressional authority that provided the Trump administration the necessary time to consolidate its war footing.
More damningly, during the intense budget battles and government shutdowns of late 2025 and early 2026, Jeffries entirely isolated the anti-war struggle from budget negotiations. During the funding lapse, he explicitly refused to make halting the war machine a condition for reopening the government.
Instead, he hyper-focused his messaging, insisting he had no part in anything. In his words: "Donald Trump and Republicans have now shut down the federal government because they do not want to protect the healthcare of the American people."
He, alongside other Vichy Democrats in the House and Senate, effectively dismissed Congress's ultimate constitutional leverage, foreclosing the possibility of threatening fiscal gridlock to advance the anti-war position. He waits too long to act, and when he finally does, he ensures the immediate and pressing mechanics of the empire remain undisturbed. The bombs have already dropped, the war has already begun. Children are dead, and the Ayatollah is too.
A Modern Marshal Pétain
Even if you’re a liberal, you should hate Hakeem Jeffries. His tenure as Democratic leader in the House has been a spiral of wimpish failure, unmitigated disaster, and botched PR responses. From the perspective of a mainstream Democrat whose sole political objective is opposing Donald Trump and his Republican Party, his tenure has been one of unqualified, objective failure. As demonstrated above, we’ve slid into no less than two illegal, imperialist wars. But the general tendency of the partisan struggle against the Republican administration has been fecklessness, weakness, and defeat. To comprehend the sheer strategic bankruptcy of Jeffries, one need not be a committed socialist or political theoretician. He does not fight Trump; he manages the aesthetics of capitulation and vacillation. He prefers the theater of procedural and symbolic opposition over material and consequential struggle.
This dynamic is exemplified by the historic 43-day government shutdown in late 2025, a temporary period where Vichy Democrats pretended to legislatively struggle to protect healthcare and extend expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits. Perhaps even this is too generous, as these right-wing Democrats were skittish from the beginning about using their limited minority powers to maximally and intransigently oppose Republican governance. Jeffries refused to even take credit for the shutdown, instead insisting the public blame Republicans for self-inflicted incompetence; anything to avoid being seen fighting.
Behind the aesthetics of cowardly and reluctant resistance lay a profound failure to wield actual power. Jeffries, acting in conjunction with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, abdicated the party's most potent leverage. To defeat Trump’s agenda, the Democratic leadership needed to continually whip their representatives and hold the line to keep the government shut down in perpetuity until their demands were met.
Instead, Jeffries treated the shutdown as a short-term public relations exercise rather than a structural blockade. A Schumer-Jeffries split on tactical timelines further indicated to Republicans that Vichy Democrats were never truly willing to endure the political pain of a perpetual shutdown. The capitulation culminated when eight Democratic senators broke ranks, crossing the aisle to advance a Republican funding bill that ended the 43-day shutdown without securing the healthcare protections Democrats had demanded.
Though Jeffries postured against the final Senate deal to save face, the collapse of the Democratic line revolved entirely around his failure of leadership. A true opposition leader would have been unyielding in their efforts to enforce discipline to ensure the blockade remained impenetrable. The base would have backed him to the hilt, as polling of Americans during that time indicated. Instead, he made speeches with the passion of an insurance actuary. Then he capitulated and moved on.
Even now, as Trump simply issues illegal taxes in the form of tariffs and refuses to allocate legally mandated congressional appropriations, Jeffries works tirelessly to define the current round of budget negotiations as narrowly as possible. The regime has and is constructing a rabidly violent and viciously racist internal police force in the form of the Department of Homeland Security. Jeffries' demands are simple: better training for our Gestapo agents, along with a polite ask to carry out their ethnic cleansing in good order without disturbing everyday commerce and inciting violent backlash.
This failure of legislative leadership should disgust liberals. Liberalism is supposedly a universalist ideology that calls for the freedom of every individual on earth, no matter what side of the arbitrary lines on a map you were born. Instead, liberalism has been made into a joke, its supposed champions revealed to be what they always were: bankrupt collaborationists.
The Origins of a Cog
So why is he like this? How could the world’s oldest political party have allowed itself, in a moment of great crisis, to be led by such an impotent incompetent? To understand why Hakeem Jeffries functions this way, one must understand who he is and how he came to be leader of the Vichy Democrats.
Born in 1970 and raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Jeffries is frequently presented in campaign literature as a gritty product of the working-class neighborhoods he now represents. However, his biographical trajectory reveals a path defined not by grassroots struggle, but by elite institutional filtering and the mastery of corporate defense.
Following his education at SUNY Binghamton, Georgetown, and NYU Law, Jeffries did not enter the trenches of community organizing, labor law, civil rights litigation, or public defense. Instead, he immediately entered the upper echelons of corporate litigation at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. During his tenure at the firm (1998–2004), Jeffries was socialized into an environment where the primary objective was the protection of massive capital concentrations against regulatory, social, and legal challenges.
Paul Weiss is a central node in the infrastructure of global capital defense. It is an institution that has made millions defending some of the most repugnant corporate villains of recent decades. The firm has a storied history of representing the most destructive corporate forces on the planet, including a decade-long defense of ExxonMobil against climate change litigation brought by U.S. cities and states seeking compensation for environmental harms, alongside heinous exploitation in facilities all over the world. They’ve recently gained further notoriety by capitulating to the administration’s threats to revoke their government contracts by offering dozens of hours of free legal aid in a negotiated settlement.
This is the ethical universe in which Hakeem Jeffries was trained. While at Paul Weiss, and later in corporate litigation roles defending media conglomerates like Viacom and CBS, Jeffries learned to marshal facts and deploy rhetoric to shield corporate behemoths from accountability. (It is worth noting the moral rot at the core of Paul Weiss; in early 2026, the firm's chair, Brad Karp, was forced to suddenly resign after it was revealed he had been a guest at the mansion of the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and exchanged friendly emails with him).
Speaking of Epstein, this professional formation is a textbook example of the Chomskyan self-selection process. In this structural framework, the institutional hierarchy of the Democratic Party does not necessarily demand explicit, coerced ideological loyalty from its leaders. Instead, it naturally filters for individuals whose internal values, class allegiances, and professional instincts already align perfectly with the requirements of the donor class.
Jeffries did not have to abandon a radical working-class agenda to ascend to the leadership; he never possessed one. By the time he entered the New York State Assembly in 2007, he was an expert practitioner of capital preservation. He was promoted precisely because he had demonstrated his utility as a reliable guardian of institutional interests, a man who treats the American working class with predatory contempt.
The Great Filter
The Democratic Party, in its post-Citizens United iteration, effectively filters out genuine populist or working-class candidates because ascension within the party infrastructure requires an absolute, unyielding mastery of the donor-class interface. Jeffries is the ultimate product of this environment. He has no deep, organic connection to the Democratic base; he only knows the donors. His political power is derived almost exclusively from his ability to raise staggering amounts of capital from the most reactionary sectors of the economy, promising them legislative stability in return for their financial patronage.
A central pillar of Jeffries’ donor base is the hawkish pro-Israel lobby, most notably the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC has recently been hiding its donations from public view by distributing its funds to a network of shell donation fronts. Jeffries himself is a major, direct beneficiary of this financial network.
While he has publicly attempted to mislead his constituents by claiming that AIPAC's PAC only gives him the per-cycle maximum, investigations have revealed that the organization has flooded his campaign with more than a million dollars in earmarked donations. This massive influx of capital guarantees his unwavering commitment to the "ironclad" security of Israel, transforming the Democratic leader into a legislative proxy for a foreign policy defined by unconditional military aid and the violent suppression of Palestinian solidarity.
Equally influential in Jeffries' rise is the emerging cryptocurrency lobby, which has rapidly consolidated power within the Democratic caucus by utilizing brute financial force. The crypto industry, seeking to evade regulatory scrutiny and legitimize its speculative, fraudulent financial products, has poured tens of millions into political campaigns. Crypto PACs like Fairshake, Protect Progress, and Defend American Jobs have amassed hundreds of millions to influence the 2026 and 2028 electoral cycles. These PACs have donated generously to Hakeem Jeffries and to the House Majority PAC, a campaign spending arm of the House Democrats.
Jeffries’ allegiance to financial capital is not a new phenomenon; it is a long-standing feature of his legislative record. In 2013, deep into the aftermath of the global financial crisis and three years after the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, Jeffries broke with the progressive wing of his own party to vote for a measure written directly by Citigroup lobbyists. This legislation successfully killed the Dodd-Frank "swaps push-out" rule, allowing massive Wall Street banks to continue engaging in highly risky derivative trades while remaining backed by taxpayer-funded insurance.
It is Jeffries’ skill at appeasing these large donors that led to his rapid ascendance in Democratic Party leadership. He is very close to the people with money, and so he is extremely effective at accepting the money they offer. He’s a politician of, by, and for the post-Citizens United world, fully bought and sold, detached from the populist will of his actual voters.
He is a dreadfully boring man, devoid of vigor or presence, utterly unsuited to an era defined by the laws of populism. He has the affect of a monotonous drone and speaks as though allergic to conviction or principle. The only reason he's made it this far is that he's assuredly an expert one-on-one schmoozer, talented in wining and dining the Democratic donor elite. He is skilled at very little beyond career advancement and fundraising. If he were anyone else, he wouldn’t be where he is.
An Anti-Socialist Vanguard
While Jeffries’ resistance to Donald Trump is purely aesthetic, and his posture toward Wall Street is submissively accommodating, his relationship with the progressive and socialist left is defined by aggressive, highly effective, and deeply personal hostility. Hakeem Jeffries hates the left, and he struggles mightily against them. He reserves his true political acumen, his fundraising prowess, and his strategic viciousness exclusively for destroying working-class insurgents within his own party.
Jeffries has explicitly drawn a line in the sand, positioning himself as an ideological combatant against socialism. He distinguishes himself heavily from the left, proudly stating that he will never "bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism". To justify this hostility, he utilizes a highly cynical, carefully calibrated deployment of identity politics, deliberately driving a wedge between racial justice and class solidarity.
Jeffries has argued that "Black progressives do tend to tackle issues first and foremost with an understanding that systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years," while contrasting this with "hard-left progressives" who "tend to view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class".
By framing race and class as mutually exclusive priorities, Jeffries provides a moral shield for his corporate donors. He weaponizes identity to delegitimize the demand for systemic economic redistribution, implying that universal public goods are somehow alien or secondary to the needs of marginalized communities. This rhetorical maneuver effectively silences the demand for systemic economic change by framing it as a distraction from racial justice, even as his own voting record on financial deregulation often favors the very corporate interests that drive racial wealth disparities.
This rhetorical warfare is backed by formidable, well-funded institutional machinery. In 2021, Jeffries partnered with Josh Gottheimer (a leader of the corporate-aligned Problem Solvers Caucus who actively undermines progressive social spending legislation) to launch the Team Blue PAC. The explicitly stated purpose of Team Blue PAC is to protect entrenched, moderate Democratic incumbents from "strident electoral challenges" mounted by the left.
Heavily funded by corporate PACs representing the insurance, real estate, and telecommunications industries, including UnitedHealth Group, Comcast, and the National Association of Realtors, Team Blue is explicitly articulated to serve as a defensive bulwark against organizations like Justice Democrats and the DSA. Jeffries framed the necessity of the PAC as a defense against "extremists and other outside forces," effectively labeling grassroots working-class organizers as a hostile contagion to be eradicated from the party.
The devastating efficacy and profound hypocrisy of Jeffries' anti-left strategy was fully realized during the high-profile primary defeat of Representative Jamaal Bowman. Bowman, a progressive incumbent and vocal critic of the Israeli military assault on Gaza, faced a vicious primary challenge from George Latimer. Latimer's campaign was entirely propped up by an unprecedented avalanche of dark money from AIPAC's super PAC, which spent millions to saturate the airwaves and destroy Bowman's reputation.
Faced with this right-wing, corporate-funded assault on one of his own Democratic caucus members, Jeffries’ response was calculated, surgical abandonment. While he offered a perfunctory endorsement and a recorded robocall to technically fulfill his leadership pledge to support incumbents, he refused to make a single campaign visit to back Bowman.
More importantly, Jeffries utterly refused to condemn or speak out against the massive influx of AIPAC spending that was actively distorting the democratic process in a safe blue district. His team excused his absence by claiming the Democratic leader was "fully focused on winning back the House," noting that he had traveled to Seattle, San Francisco, and Louisville to fundraise—undoubtedly interfacing with the very donor class that was funding Bowman's political execution.
The message sent by Jeffries was unambiguous: if a progressive steps out of line with the dictates of the Zionist lobby or the corporate donor base, the party leadership will step aside and allow private capital to annihilate them. The Team Blue PAC exists to protect corporate centrists from the left, but absolutely no such protection exists for progressives facing attacks from the right. Jeffries functions as the gatekeeper, the ratchet man, ensuring that the progressive bloc remains marginalized, disciplined, and structurally incapable of capturing the party apparatus.
Jeffries, like all sleepy weasels of his kind, is quick to shout "Vote Blue No Matter Who" when it comes to electing genocidaires, but funds vicious internal warfare when it comes to fighting working-class or socialist factions within his own party.
Jeffries Must Be Removed
It is a profound embarrassment for the American socialist movement and the Democratic Socialists of America not to mobilize a total, uncompromising effort to destroy Hakeem Jeffries politically. He is not a formidable, untouchable mastermind; he is an entirely hollow construct, a replaceable cog installed by the donor class to manage the party's leftward flank. He possesses no organic mass base, no working-class constituency, and no populist charisma. He survives solely through the frictionless transfer of capital from Wall Street, AIPAC, and the crypto-sphere into his campaign coffers.
The conditions for his removal are glaringly apparent in the 2026 electoral landscape. The Democratic base, furious over the party's capitulation to Trump's authoritarian push, its complicity in imperial violence, and its failure to address the crushing contradictions of capitalist modernity, is deeply alienated from its leadership. A recent focus group of rank-and-file Democrats conducted by the New York Times described the party under its current leadership as "spineless," "sold out," "incompetent," "complacent," and having "no balls". This grassroots fury is not theoretical; it is already manifesting in a wave of mass mobilization.
Furthermore, the anti-establishment revolt is yielding stunning electoral victories that prove the vulnerability of the centrist machine. Zohran Mamdani's shock upset victory, despite Jeffries’ obvious opposition, has inspired a new wave of insurgents to mount primary challenges against entrenched Democrats who thought they could cruise in safe seats.
In the Texas Senate District 9 special election, Taylor Rehmet, a machinist union leader, scored a stunning upset victory in a district Donald Trump carried by 17 points, besting a heavily funded GOP opponent. In the New Jersey 11th congressional district special election, Analilia Mejia, a former Bernie Sanders campaign director who led chants to abolish ICE and holds fiercely critical views of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, won the Democratic nomination despite, or perhaps because of, the convoluted multi-million dollar spending warfare deployed by AIPAC in the region.
These victories demonstrate that when confronted with organized, working-class anger and a coherent populist message, the corporate-funded establishment is highly vulnerable. Jeffries’ fundamental weakness lies in his absolute detachment from the material realities of the voters he purports to represent. Because he only knows the donors, his only defensive mechanism is outspending his opponents using PAC money. If confronted with a highly organized, relentless, and ideologically disciplined mass movement capable of bypassing the financial chokeholds of the corporate media, his power base crumbles.
All socialists must recognize that Hakeem Jeffries represents a critical bottleneck to progress in the United States. He is the active, willing enforcer of the neoliberal stalemate, utilizing his corporate legal training to suppress class conflict and enforce donor hegemony. As long as he remains the leader of the House Democrats, the party will function as a fundraising machine designed to co-opt, defang, and destroy the left while offering nothing but empty, 8-hour procedural speeches against the fascist right.
To ignore Jeffries, or to attempt to negotiate or compromise with his leadership under the guise of "party unity," is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of power in the post-Citizens United era. He will never bend the knee to the left; therefore, the left must break him. The campaign against him must be vicious, exhaustive, and relentless.
This is the best shot the socialist left will ever have. To fail to take it is to accept the permanent enclosure of American politics by the forces of capital, managed in perpetuity by a sentinel who despises the very people he is supposed to lead. More than that, if we socialists refuse to take up our own historical role, to seize the Party from the cowardly Vichy Democrats, we will find ourselves marginalized again by an alternative, non-socialist populism. These non-socialist progressives will channel populist anger away from internationalist liberation, leaving America’s potential for massive expansion of the socialist movement in the dust.
Jeffries has long been at war with the DSA and the socialist left, whom he calls “team gentrification.” He refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani in the face of his ascendant popular support. He has, and will, fight us with tooth and claw, while bringing none of that same grit against the fascists. If we of the socialist left have any shame, any self-respect, we will pay him back eye for an eye. The DSA chose not to reopen the vote to endorse Chi Ossé and mount a lightning campaign against Jeffries. We must take our best shot to dethrone him and the rest of the ghoulish Vichy Democratic establishment he leads during the 2026 and 2028 primary season. To do otherwise is to relinquish our agency.
It does not matter that we could likely lose. We must try or all may be lost for the foreseeable future. A populist socialist movement must decisively move to seize control of the Democratic Party while the establishment lies flat on its back. This strategy is time-sensitive and urgent, as well as our most direct and immediate path to a maximal position of power so as to impact the events to come. No more hesitation, and no more wasting time.
The task ahead is clear: go for the throat of the beast!
