New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told CNN on Saturday that he is "torn" about wanting to see the Iranian regime toppled, not because of the geopolitical risks, not because of the human cost, but because a successful outcome might hand a political win to President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Read that again. A three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, one of the most prominent foreign-affairs voices in American media, said on national television that his opposition to two elected leaders weighs against his desire to see a terrorist-sponsoring theocracy fall. The admission, made during an appearance on CNN's "Smerconish," drew immediate and sharp criticism from officials and commentators across the political spectrum.
As Fox News Digital reported, Friedman began his remarks by acknowledging the obvious case for regime change in Tehran. He told host Michael Smerconish that the current Iranian government is "a terrible regime for its people in the region." He said nothing would improve the Middle East more than replacing it with a government "focused on enabling its people to realize their full potential and integrating peacefully with other countries."
Then came the turn.
Friedman laid out the stakes plainly enough. He named Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen as countries Iran effectively occupies through its proxy network. He said he was "all for" seeing that grip broken. But he could not leave it there.
Friedman told Smerconish:
"The problem is I really don't want to see Bibi Netanyahu or Donald Trump politically strengthened by this war, because they are two awful human beings."
He went further, calling both leaders "alleged crooks" and accusing them of conducting "anti-democratic projects in their own countries." He said they were "doing terrible things to America's standing in the world and Israel's standing in the world." And he concluded with a sentence that crystallized the contradiction at the heart of his position:
"And so I really find myself torn. I want to see Iran militarily defeated, but I do not want to see these two terrible people strengthened."
There it is. The columnist wants the right outcome, the fall of a regime that funds terrorism, brutalizes its own citizens, and destabilizes an entire region, but he cannot bring himself to root for it wholeheartedly because the wrong people, in his view, might get credit.
The reaction was fast and pointed. Mike Huckabee, Trump's ambassador to Israel, responded publicly, writing: "What kind of sick hate must @tomfriedman have that he roots for USA to lose to a terrorist regime who has killed thousands of Americans?" Huckabee added a contrast from his own record: "I didn't vote for Obama but I praised him for taking out Bin Laden."
That comparison cuts to the bone. Huckabee, a Republican who opposed Barack Obama on most policy grounds, had no trouble giving credit where it was due when American forces eliminated the architect of 9/11. The suggestion is clear: when national security is at stake, partisanship should stop at the water's edge. Friedman's remarks suggest the opposite impulse, that domestic political grudges now extend into war and peace.
California Post opinion editor Joel Pollack offered a drier take. He wrote that he "commend[ed] @tomfriedman for his refreshing candor." The sarcasm was unmistakable. Pollack then broadened the critique, as Breitbart reported:
"Yes, there are some Democrats who want America to lose militarily, so Trump and Netanyahu can't 'win' politically. Trump isn't running again and you can't vote for/against Netanyahu. The left has no foreign policy, only domestic."
Fox News chief political analyst Brit Hume kept his assessment to six words, calling Friedman's remarks "a perfect distillation of TDS."
Friedman's candor, and it was candid, give him that, exposed something that conservative critics have argued for years. The charge is not new: that a significant faction of the American commentariat and political class has allowed opposition to Trump to override every other consideration, including national security. What is new is hearing it stated so plainly by a columnist of Friedman's stature, on a major cable network, without apparent embarrassment.
This is a man who has spent decades writing about the Middle East, who has argued repeatedly for a more stable regional order, who has called out the Iranian regime's malign influence in column after column. And yet, when the prospect of that regime's defeat becomes real, his first instinct is to calculate whether it helps people he dislikes.
The pattern is not unique to Friedman. Sen. John Fetterman has accused American media of doing Iran's bidding, a striking charge from a Democrat who has broken with his own party on the issue. When a sitting Democratic senator sees the same problem from inside his caucus, it is worth asking how deep the rot goes.
Consider the logic Friedman presented. Iran's regime is terrible. It oppresses its people. It occupies four countries through proxies. It should be replaced. All of that is true, Friedman says. But the people currently in charge of the effort to confront Iran, the sitting president of the United States and the elected prime minister of Israel, are, in Friedman's telling, so objectionable that their success gives him pause.
What policy does that logic produce? If the answer is "do nothing until leaders I approve of are in charge," then the Iranian people and the people of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen are told to wait. Their liberation is contingent not on strategy or capability but on the domestic political calendar of American progressives.
Friedman's remarks did not arrive in a vacuum. They fit a broader pattern in which institutional media figures and Democratic officials have allowed hostility toward Trump to distort their positions on issues that should transcend partisanship. Declassified memos have exposed the bias behind the whistleblower who triggered Trump's first impeachment, revealing how institutional actors allowed personal opposition to shape official conduct.
The same dynamic plays out in smaller ways every week. Officials and commentators who once held conventional foreign-policy views find themselves unable to support outcomes they would have cheered under a different administration.
Huckabee's Obama-and-Bin-Laden example is the cleanest rebuttal available. Republicans did not like Obama. They opposed his domestic agenda, his Iran nuclear deal, his approach to the Middle East. But when Navy SEALs put rounds into the compound in Abbottabad, the right gave credit. The mission mattered more than the man in the Oval Office.
Friedman, by his own admission, cannot clear that bar. He wants Iran defeated. He just does not want the current president to benefit. That is not a foreign-policy position. It is a grudge dressed up as analysis.
CNN's own polling has delivered grim news for Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms, suggesting that voters are not rewarding the kind of reflexive opposition Friedman embodies. The public can sense when leaders and opinion-makers are rooting for outcomes based on who gets credit rather than what is right.
There is an irony in all of this. Friedman's honesty is, in one narrow sense, useful. He said out loud what many in the progressive foreign-policy establishment think but rarely admit. The question is whether that honesty changes anything, whether the people who share Friedman's instinct will recognize how corrosive it is, or whether they will simply nod along and move on.
The people who pay the price for this kind of thinking are not columnists or cable hosts. They are the Iranian dissidents who want their country back. They are the Lebanese citizens living under Hezbollah's shadow. They are the Yemenis caught in a war fueled by Tehran's ambitions. When institutions let political bias shape their conduct, the consequences fall on people who have no voice in American cable-news debates.
Friedman acknowledged all of that. He said the regime is terrible. He said the region would be better without it. He said he was "all for" a new Iran focused on its people's potential. And then he said the quiet part out loud: but not if it helps Trump.
That is not being torn. That is knowing the right answer and choosing not to give it.
