MS NOW anchor Lawrence O’Donnell skewered President Trump’s ongoing military campaign in Iran Monday night, remarking that “no president has ever taken war less seriously.”
“Donald Trump’s war became fully illegal last week, and Donald Trump seems to know that,” the “Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” host noted Monday. O’Donnell went on to explain that the War Powers Act of 1973 states that no president can continue military operations in a foreign country for more than 60 days unless Congress has either openly declared war or enacted a specific authorization for the intended use of the U.S. Armed Forces. The war in Iran is now well past the 60-day mark.
Trump, for his part, has defended the duration of the war by comparing it to the 19 years that America spent fighting the Vietnam War and the eight years the U.S. spent fighting the Iraq War. O’Donnell took issue with that logic.
“Congress learned its lesson with Vietnam, the war that Donald Trump refused to participate in when offered a chance by his local draft board,” O’Donnell noted, adding, “The concept of the illegal war in American politics was born in Vietnam.”
You can watch the full “Last Word” segment yourself below.
O’Donnell recapped how a minor sea encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 was over-exaggerated by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to convince Congress to approve a full-on war in Vietnam.
“Members of Congress came to regret their vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and during the Nixon presidency began doing everything they possibly could to cut off funding for what had become Richard Nixon’s war,” O’Donnell explained. “By 1973, Congress was no longer content to reduce funding for the Vietnam War. They wanted to prevent the next Vietnam by writing into American law an unambiguous 60-day limit on the kind of war-making that President Lyndon Johnson created.”
Johnson and Nixon, O’Donnell noted, never went to the lengths to downplay their shared military conflict in Vietnam the way Trump has the war in Iran, either.
“Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon never pretended that it wasn’t a war. They never called it a ‘little detour’ as Donald Trump did recently. They never called it an ‘excursion’ as Donald Trump has called it, and they never pretended that it was just a military operation,” O’Donnell said. He then fully condemned Trump’s actions and statements about the Iran War.
“No president has ever taken war less seriously, and America does not approve,” the MS NOW host concluded, adding, “Donald Trump is the first president in history to wage a war that a majority of Americans have opposed from Day One.”
