American voters have a long memory for one particular kind of broken promise. Tell them you will keep their sons out of a foreign war, then march them into one, and they will eventually send you a bill. In 1920 the Democrats paid it. On Tuesday, the Republicans did.
On election night 2024, Donald Trump told a cheering crowd, “I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” Fifteen months later came Operation Epic Fury. Eight months after that, CBS News projects that Democrats will take both the House and the Senate. JD Vance, never one to bury the lede, summed it up on X: “The reason we lost is the war.”
Woodrow Wilson would have understood. He ran in 1916 on a slogan that a century of history teachers have never let anyone forget
