DAMNING WITH FAINT PRAISE: Scarborough Shocks Viewers with Rare Defense of Trump’s Iran Strike: ‘Any President Would’ve Done It.’
Hell may have just frozen over.
In a rare moment of clarity from the liberal media, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough left viewers stunned on Monday when he offered a surprising defense of President Donald Trump’s bold and strategic strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Known for his relentless criticism of Trump, Scarborough broke ranks with the left-wing echo chamber by acknowledging the strength and effectiveness of the president’s Operation Midnight Hammer.
During Monday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe,” Scarborough said he was not “championing either side,” but defended Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear program. He argued that any president, including Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, would have felt compelled to act given Iran’s looming nuclear threat.
“I find it hard to believe that Bush 41, Bush 43, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you know, go down the list, any president wouldn’t have felt compelled to take that strike,” he said. “What would Monday look like if he hadn’t have moved? If Iran wasn’t already at 60 percent [enrichment of uranium] and an ability to create nuclear weapons in a short matter of time, right?”
Right. As Jeffrey Blehar writes: Trump’s Iran Strike Shows Precisely Why Elections Matter.
This is an unalloyed victory for the forces of sanity and civilization. To those who point to the inevitability of unforeseen “blowback,” I will remind you that Iran and its proxies have been engaging in low-level conflict with America for well over a decade now — who do you think was funding and training the people killing our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan all those years? — and now it is free to try its hand at more of the same, if it wishes, this time without a looming nuclear threat to back it up. America has come out ahead on this in concrete, measurable, and hugely valuable geostrategic ways.
Most importantly of all, none of this would have happened if Kamala Harris were president. Think about that for a moment; think about the road not taken. One can only speculate about hypotheticals, but . . . c’mon now. Look into your heart, you know it to be true. Imagine a President Harris, sitting uneasily atop a Democratic coalition barely held together at the seams: Would she have encouraged Netanyahu in his initial campaign against Iranian military and nuclear assets? Would she have provided the final air support and ordnance necessary to get the job done? With people such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Hogg, and Zohran Mamdani calling the shots among large segments of her base?
To ask the question out loud is to answer it: no. For that reason alone, it is no exaggeration to say that the shape of the world perceptibly turned for the better on the outcome of last November’s election. You can draw a straight line between Donald Trump’s winning the 2024 race and Iran’s nuclear weapons program now being best described as a series of variably sized craters. If you supported Donald Trump and voted for him in 2024, you should feel proud of it today: Saturday is the most obvious evidence yet of why your vote mattered. (And if you voted for Donald Trump because you mistakenly thought him to be a whimpering, limp-tailed isolationist? Well, your dismay pleases me as well.)
Jonathan Tobin adds: Would anyone but Trump have done it?
There have always been reasons for American presidents to avoid taking action on Iran.
Key among them has been an unwillingness to acknowledge Iran’s goal or what it would mean if Tehran obtained a nuclear weapon or was allowed, as it appeared to be already the case in recent years, to become a threshold nuclear power.
Many in the American intelligence community clung to the belief that “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s purported ban on Iran’s building a nuclear weapon was a genuine policy decision. Though it was proven false by the regime’s nuclear files obtained by Israel’s Mossad in 2018, those determined to give Tehran a pass—like current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—have continued to wrongly insist that its nuclear project is not a threat.
Others thought that dealing with the problem could also be postponed. That was the position of the George W. Bush administration, which was already embroiled in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama went even further and negotiated a nuclear deal that not only postponed a reckoning on the issue, but essentially guaranteed that Iran would get a weapon once the sunset provisions in the 2015 accord expired by 2030. More than that, Obama and his former staffers who ran foreign policy during the Biden administration went even further and imagined that Tehran was open to a rapprochement with the West and believed that it should replace Israel and Saudi Arabia as the lynchpin of U.S. policy in the region.
Flashback: Ben Rhodes: Obama Admin Threw Israel Under Bus at U.N. to Pressure Jewish State.