Joe Scarborough Warns Trump’s Iran Speech Sounded A Lot Like Putin
MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough discussed on Thursday morning President Donald Trump’s speech from the night before on the war in Iran and warned that the president is starting to sound a lot like Vladimir Putin.
“John, let me ask you. You just said he only thought this would be a conflict that would last a couple of days, a week or two,” Scarborough began in response to co-host Jonathan Lemire.
“Who does that sound like? Vladimir Putin going into Ukraine? See, we live in the age of asymmetrical warfare. The age of asymmetrical warfare, where weaker countries may not be able to prevail outright, but they can bleed dry another country. You look at Russia, who thought they were going to have Kyiv in three days,” Scarborough continued, adding:
A million Russian troops may have died — 1.3, 1.4 million casualties — their economy’s been wrecked. They haven’t been able to take over the Donbas, despite the fact the administration keeps lying and saying that Russia is about to take over the Donbas, Ukraine better make a deal fast. The Ukrainians say, “Yeah, no, we’re fine — eat this drone, Russia.” And that continues. With the words that you just said, you apply that not only to Ukraine and Russia, but now to the United States and Iran. I think we’re doing much better, obviously, than Russia is, as far as degrading military assets.
But this is the new world we’re living in, and I just have to underline it again. If Donald Trump didn’t hate Zelensky so much, if Donald Trump didn’t hate Ukraine so much, if the administration didn’t have such contempt for Ukraine, they would have called them before the war and said, “Listen, we’re gonna go in there. We know the Iranians have been supplying drones to Russia.
Tell us, how do we stop them?” But they hated them so much that they didn’t do that a month or two months or three months in advance. If they had, this war would have looked radically different, mainly for our Gulf region allies who are getting pounded every day.
“Yeah, the parallels here are uncanny,” agreed Lemire, adding:
Ukraine still making that offer today to help — that the administration is turning down. So a few other things about last night. President Trump was meant to be framing this as, “This is why we’re doing it.” I don’t know how effective that was.
In fact, I heard from a number of people — Democrats, Republicans alike — who were like, “What was the point of that speech? It didn’t really go anywhere. There was nothing new.” But I do think, Mika, it is interesting — we should dwell on a couple of things that he didn’t say. Yes, there was the vague timeline of, “Oh, this will be two to three weeks.” There was some thought before he took the podium last night that he was going to actually announce an end to this conflict.
Markets were hoping he would, so when he didn’t, they fell last night. Number two: there’s talk — I reported yesterday — the Pentagon has presented the president with two distinct military options. I wrote about this yesterday afternoon. One would be taking troops to Kharg Island to try to seize those energy productions. The other would be going into Iran to take their uranium materials, to try to prevent them from ever getting a weapon. Though they’re ready to go and the assets are in place, the president just has to give the go-ahead.
Watch the clip above via MS NOW.
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