Lawrence O'Donnell Condemns Trump's Iran War as 'Fully Illegal' and Historically Unprecedented

MSNBC anchor Lawrence O’Donnell sharply criticized President Donald Trump’s ongoing military campaign in Iran during his Monday night broadcast, declaring, “No president has ever taken war less seriously.”

“Donald Trump’s war became fully illegal last week, and Donald Trump seems to know that,” O’Donnell stated on The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell. He emphasized that the War Powers Act of 1973 prohibits any president from continuing military operations in a foreign country for more than 60 days without explicit congressional authorization—either a formal declaration of war or a specific use-of-force resolution. The campaign in Iran has now exceeded that 60-day threshold.

Trump has attempted to justify the prolonged conflict by comparing its duration to the 19 years the U.S. spent in the Vietnam War and the eight years in the Iraq War. O’Donnell dismissed this comparison outright.

“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 remarked. “The concept of the illegal war in American politics was born in Vietnam.”

He then recounted how President Lyndon B. Johnson exploited the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 to escalate U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a deception that later led Congress to regret its support for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

“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 minimized their military actions in Vietnam the way Trump has downplayed the conflict in Iran. “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,” he said.

O’Donnell reserved his strongest condemnation for Trump’s framing of the war. “No president has ever taken war less seriously, and America does not approve,” he declared. “Donald Trump is the first president in history to wage a war that a majority of Americans have opposed from Day One.”