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MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough defended President Donald Trump on Monday over his decision to strike Iran’s nuclear program, suggesting other presidents might have made the same choice.
“I said on Thursday or Friday, the president had no good options. What would Monday look like if he hadn’t have moved? If Iran wasn’t already at 60% and an ability to create nuclear weapons in a short matter of time, right?” Scarborough began. “I find it hard to believe that Bush 41, Bush 43, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you know, go down the list, any presidents, wouldn’t have felt compelled to take that strike.”
Scarborough, a former GOP congressman and longtime critic of the president, asked Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, about Trump’s decision during “Morning Joe.”
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Joe Scarborough suggested on Monday that other presidents would have also made the decision to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, as Trump did. (Left:Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Global Citizen, Right: Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
“I’m not championing either side of this. Although I ask you, David, how difficult would it have been for any president to not take that shot if they knew that Iran was even being attacked by the United Nations?”
Ignatius said that past presidents have also considered this scenario.
“Three previous presidents have considered precisely this scenario. They’re the ones who developed the weapons and the battle plan. This was something inherited by President Trump. And each of them pulled back because of the uncertainties associated with the action. They decided it just wasn’t worth doing,” he said.
“If President Trump decided last Friday, there is no chance that the negotiated settlement that I want to resolve this is going to work, the Iranians are jamming me, they’re just pushing me along, they’re stonewalling, is the word that J.D. Vance used. He, in a sense, did have no choice but to move it on to a different terrain,” Ignatius said.
He warned that the U.S. just doesn’t know what might come of the move.
“The problem is on that different terrain. We just don’t know what’s ahead. But I take your point, right. It’s his choices were debased at the moment he had to make the decision,” Ignatius said.
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President Donald Trump on June 15, 2025 (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Scarborough noted that past presidents didn’t have Iran in a degraded and “cornered” position.
He said Iran was “even getting condemned by the United Nations for how quickly they were moving towards developing a nuclear weapon.”
MSNBC contributor Katty Kay agreed with Scarborough and said Iran had been weakened over the last year, putting Trump in a unique position.
“You look at the situation with Hezbollah being degraded, the situation with Syria and Assad falling, Hamas being degraded in Gaza, all around the region, Iran has suffered blows over the past year, not just the past week, and so gave Donald Trump a different set of circumstances in than those three previous presidents have faced,” she said.
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US Vice President JD Vance, from left, US President Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, US secretary of defense, during an address to the nation in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Saturday, June 21, 2025. (Carlos Barria/Reuters/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Trump earned praise from other prominent critics as well, including former National Security adviser John Bolton, who said on Sunday, “President Trump made the right decision for America.”
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“It was a decisive action. It was the right thing to do. I thought somebody should do it for a long time. But better late than never,” Bolton told CNN’s Kasie Hunt.
