Some of the top rumored Democratic potential candidates for president in 2028 are showing a united front in opposing U.S. strikes on Iran, with several high-profile figures accusing President Donald Trump of launching an unnecessary and unconstitutional war.

Former Vice President Kamala Harris said Trump was “dragging the United States into a war the American people do not want.”

“Let me be clear: I am opposed to a regime-change war in Iran, and our troops are being put in harm’s way for the sake of Trump’s war of choice,” Harris said in a statement Saturday following the joint U.S. and Israeli strikes throughout Iran.

“This is a dangerous and unnecessary gamble with American lives that also jeopardizes stability in the region and our standing in the world,” she continued. “What we are witnessing is not strength. It is recklessness dressed up as resolve.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom delivered some of his sharpest criticism during a book tour stop Saturday night in San Francisco, accusing Trump of manufacturing a crisis.

“It stems from weakness masquerading as strength,” Newsom said. “He lied to you. So reckless is the only way to describe this.”

“He didn’t describe to the American people what the endgame is here,” Newsom added. “There wasn’t one. He manufactured it.”

Newsom is currently promoting his memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry,” with recent and upcoming stops in South Carolina, New Hampshire and Nevada — three key early voting states in the Democratic presidential calendar.

Earlier in the day, Newsom said Iran’s “corrupt and repressive” regime must never obtain nuclear weapons and that the “leadership of Iran must go.”

“But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war that will risk the lives of our American service members and our friends without justification to the American people,” Newsom wrote on X.

California is home to more than half of the roughly 400,000 Iranian immigrants in the United States, including a large community in West Los Angeles often referred to as “Tehrangeles.”

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., a leading progressive voice and “Squad” member, accused Trump of dragging Americans into a conflict they did not support.

“The American people are once again dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions. This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic,” Ocasio-Cortez said.

“Just this week, Iran and the United States were negotiating key measures that could have staved off war. The President walked away from these discussions and chose war instead,” she continued.

“In moments of war, our Constitution is unambiguous: Congress authorizes war. The President does not,” she said, pledging to vote “YES on Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie’s War Powers Resolution.”

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another Democrat often mentioned as a potential 2028 contender, also criticized the strikes and accused Trump of ignoring Congress.

“No justification, no authorization from Congress, and no clear objective,” Pritzker wrote on X.

“Donald Trump is once again sidestepping the Constitution and once again failing to explain why he’s taking us into another war,” he continued. “Americans asked for affordable housing and health care, not another potentially endless conflict.”

“God protect our troops,” Pritzker added.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro focused his criticism on war powers, arguing Trump acted outside constitutional guardrails.

“In our democracy, the American people — through our elected representatives — decide when our nation goes to war,” Shapiro said, adding that Trump “acted unilaterally — without Congressional approval.”

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“Make no mistake, the Iranian regime represses its own people… they must never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons,” he said. “But that does not justify the President of the United States engaging in an illegal, dangerous war.”

Shapiro added that “Congress must use all available power” to prevent further escalation.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also accused Trump of launching a “war of choice.”

“The President has launched our nation and our great military into a war of choice, risking American lives and resources, ignoring American law, and endangering our allies and partners,” Buttigieg wrote on X. “This nation learned the hard way that an unnecessary war, with no plan for what comes next, can lead to years of chaos and put America in still greater danger.”

Buttigieg has been hitting early voting states, stopping in New Hampshire and Nevada in recent weeks to campaign for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., who has been floated as a rising national figure within the party, said he lost friends in Iraq to an illegal war and opposed the strikes.

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“Young working-class kids should not pay the ultimate price for regime change and a war that hasn’t been explained or justified to the American people. We can support the democracy movement and the Iranian people without sending our troops to die,” Gallego wrote on X. 

Fox News’ Daniel Scully and Alex Nitzberg contributed to this report.

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Donald Trump has never been one to play by the rules.

Whether it’s stiffing contractors as a real estate developer, defying court orders he doesn’t like as president or leveraging the Oval Office to vastly inflate his family’s fortune, Trump’s guiding principle can be distilled to a simple, unswerving calculation: What’s in it for me?

Trump is no student of history. He’s famously allergic to books. But he knows enough to know that midterm elections like the one in November have, with few exceptions, been ugly for the party holding the presidency.

With control of the House — and Trump’s virtually unchecked authority — dangling by a gossamer thread, he reckoned correctly that Republicans were all but certain to lose power this fall unless something unusual happened.

So he effectively broke the rules.

Normally, the redrawing of the country’s congressional districts takes place once every 10 years, following the census and accounting for population changes over the previous decade. Instead, Trump prevailed upon the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, to throw out the state’s political map and refashion congressional lines to wipe out Democrats and boost GOP chances of winning as many as five additional House seats.

The intention was to create a bit of breathing room, as Democrats need a gain of just three seats to seize control of the House.

In relatively short order, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, responded with his own partisan gerrymander. He rallied voters to pass a tit-for-tat ballot measure, Proposition 50, which revised the state’s political map to wipe out Republicans and boost Democratic prospects of winning as many as five additional seats.

Then came the deluge.

In more than a dozen states, lawmakers looked at ways to tinker with their congressional maps to lift their candidates, stick it to the other party and gain House seats in November.

Some of those efforts continue, including in Virginia where, as in California, voters are being asked to amend the state Constitution to let majority Democrats redraw political lines ahead of the midterm. A special election is set for April 21.

But as the first ballots of 2026 are cast on Tuesday — in Arkansas, North Carolina and Texas — the broad contours of the House map have become clearer, along with the result of all those partisan machinations. The likely upshot is a nationwide partisan shift of fewer than a handful of seats.

The independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which has a sterling decades-long record of election forecasting, said the most probable outcome is a wash. “At the end of the day,” said Erin Covey, who analyzes House races for the Cook Report, “this doesn’t really benefit either party in a real way.”

Well.

That was a lot of wasted time and energy.

Let’s take a quick spin through the map and the math, knowing that, of course, there are no election guarantees.

In Texas, for instance, new House districts were drawn assuming Latinos would back Republican candidates by the same large percentage they supported Trump in 2024. But that’s become much less certain, given the backlash against his draconian immigration enforcement policies; numerous polls show a significant falloff in Latino support for the president, which could hurt GOP candidates up and down the ballot.

But suppose Texas Republicans gain five seats as hoped for and California Democrats pick up the five seats they’ve hand-crafted. The result would be no net change.

Elsewhere, under the best case for each party, a gain of four Democratic House seats in Virginia would be offset by a gain of four Republican House seats in Florida.

That leaves a smattering of partisan gains here and there. A combined pickup of four or so Republican seats in Ohio, North Carolina and Missouri could be mostly offset by Democratic gains of a seat apiece in New York, Maryland and Utah.

(The latter is not a result of legislative high jinks, but rather a judge throwing out the gerrymandered map passed by Utah Republicans, who ignored a voter-approved ballot measure intended to prevent such heavy-handed partisanship. A newly created district, contained entirely within Democratic-leaning Salt Lake County, seems certain to go Democrats’ way in November.)

In short, it’s easy to characterize the political exertions of Trump, Abbott, Newsom and others as so much sound and fury producing, at bottom, little to nothing.

But that’s not necessarily so.

The campaign surrounding Proposition 50 delivered a huge political boost to Newsom, shoring up his standing with Democrats, significantly raising his profile across the country and, not least for his 2028 presidential hopes, helping the governor build a significant nationwide fundraising base.

In crimson-colored Indiana, Republicans refused to buckle under tremendous pressure from Trump, Vice President JD Vance and other party leaders, rejecting an effort to redraw the state’s congressional map and give the GOP a hold on all nine House seats. That showed even Trump’s Svengali-like hold on his party has its limits.

But the biggest impact is also the most corrosive.

By redrawing political lines to predetermine the outcome of House races, politicians rendered many of their voters irrelevant and obsolete. Millions of Democrats in Texas, Republicans in California and partisans in other states have been effectively disenfranchised, their voices rendered mute. Their ballots spindled and nullified.

In short, the politicians — starting with Trump — extended a big middle finger to a large portion of the American electorate.

Is it any wonder, then, so many voters hold politicians and our political system in contempt?