‘Morning Joe’: We Should Be Grateful For Trump’s ‘Restraint’ On Iran
After President Donald Trump called off airstrikes against Iran on Thursday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe offered rare praise of the President. Host Joe Scarborough lauded Trump’s restraint in the face of hawks in the administration in an unusual moment of approval.
“Isn’t it ironic how we talk about there’s no grownups around Trump yet the people around him, the Boltons, the Pompeos, are saying let’s go, let’s go and this is the guy putting a yellow light up there,” guest Donny Deutsch said. “And look, I’ve even said he’s capable of anything – starting a war to save his presidency – but, once again, he is really demonstrating restraint here.”
Deutsch wondered whether the whole situation had been a PR exercise to allow Trump to look like the good guy, but Scarborough dismissed the suggestion.
“The Pentagon would never do that,” Scarborough said. “By the way, the Pentagon is angry this morning. As Colin Powell once said, you don’t use our men and women as toy soldiers. That’s exactly what happened. So, no, that would have never happened.”
“I do want to pick up on a point, though, that you made while we were not eviscerating the President for one morning, why don’t we just keep doing that for a second,” Scarborough said. “I had one of my children ask me about all the lies of Trump and how devastating it was, and I said it is terrible.”
“It’s terrible that he’s lying and that he’s setting this example and they say, well, what are the consequences of the lies and I went through all of it. But you know what, though, I said one thing that is interesting, and I brought up war. I’d just seen Ken Burns extraordinary documentary on Vietnam.”
“I said, we’ve had presidents who have lied before and the results have been far more extreme. John Kennedy in 1963, Ken Burns picked up on a tape talking about Vietnam saying we could never win there, the people hate us there but we can’t pull out until after the election, it would destroy us politically. ”
“LBJ in ‘64 right after he got in there saying there’s no way we can win that war but we can’t get out either. Well 57 [sic] young Americans died because of those presidents lies to the American public saying that they could win.”
“Again, I’m not defending Donald Trump here. I am just saying that presidents have lied and the impact has been deadly and some would say far more extreme […] of course he’ll probably launch a huge attack tonight, but we can at least be grateful that this President’s instinct, when it comes to war, is less, not more.”
Watch the video above, via MSNBC.
