-A new poll says the majority of Americans disapprove
of President Trump's handling of Iran
and his own team struggles to defend his lies
and borrows directly from George W. Bush's playbook.
For more on this, it's time for "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪
-You might remember that throughout President Obama's
two terms, Republicans, including Donald Trump,
objected to virtually everything he did on the grounds
that he was trampling on the Constitution
they supposedly cherished.
-I feel very strongly about our Constitution.
I'm proud of it. I love it.
And I want to go through the Constitution.
That's what we want to do.
I mean, we want to bring the Constitution back.
-I will give President Obama and the Senate Democrats credit.
They believe in principles of big government.
They believe in this relentless assault
on our Constitutional rights.
-This President wants to act as if he's a king,
as if he's a dictator.
-You see, I think we need to return
to Constitutional government.
I think they shredded the Constitution,
especially during the healthcare debate.
-Is it time the president just already do this already,
torch the Constitution?
-No! [ Laughter ]
Not the pocket Constitution! [ Laughter ]
Melodrama doesn't work as well
when you're threatening a reproduction.
It's like saying, "I'm so mad, I'm going to flip over my car!
[ Laughter ]
You left me no choice." [ Laughter ]
Also, I wish he had actually done it because then he'd
set off the fire sprinklers at Fox News
and Rudy Giuliani would have melted
like the Wicked Witch of the West.
[ Laughter ]
All you would see is a suit, some shoes,
and his big old Yankee ring. [ Laughter ]
So, the right spent eight years constantly lecturing
the rest of us about the sanctity of the Constitution
and obsessively whining
that Obama was supposedly shredding it.
And then earlier this month, Trump ordered the strike
that killed a top Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani,
without Congressional approval.
The Constitution clearly and unequivocally gives Congress
and only Congress the power to declare war.
And yet last week, after the house passed a resolution
reining in Trump's war powers,
he complained at a rally that it would be inconvenient for him
to notify Congress before moving forward with an act of war.
-These are split-second decisions.
You have to make a decision.
So they don't want me to make that decision.
They want me to call up, maybe go over there.
Let me go over to Congress.
Come on over to the White House. Let's talk about it.
When can you make it?
Well, I won't be able to make it today, sir.
How about, uh, let's say in a couple of days?
Oh, sure. Come on over.
We had to make a decision.
We didn't have time to call up Nancy,
who is not operating with a full deck.
-She's not operating with a full deck?
You're operating with a pair of deuces
and that card that has the rules on it.
[ Laughter and applause ]
So, Trump circumvented Congress
to launch a strike on an official
of a foreign government,
a decision that has been deeply unpopular
with the American people,
according to a new poll out this week.
A majority of Americans disapprove of Trump's handling
of Iran and say they feel less safe as a result.
So to try to justify the attack,
Trump's team has claimed that Soleimani
posed an imminent threat and that they had to stop it.
Although Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
has been incredibly cagey about that.
-President Trump says that General Soleimani
was planning a "imminent attack."
What was the plan?
Who were the targets? And how soon?
-There's things we simply cannot make public about
what it is we knew at that time.
And what in fact we know today about the continuing activity.
-So was the justification in that he's been
this destabilizing force in the region for so long,
or was the justification this imminent threat?
-Chuck, it's never one thing.
-There is no doubt that were a series of imminent attacks
that were being plotted by Qasem Soleimani.
We don't know precisely when
and we don't know precisely where.
But it was real.
-When you say the attacks were imminent,
how imminent were they? Are we talking about days?
Are we talking about weeks?
-If you're an American in the region, days and weeks,
this is not something that's relevant.
-These guys claim there's an imminent attack,
and then when you ask them for specifics,
suddenly they turn into characters in a French film.
[ French accent ] Days, weeks, what is the difference?
Weeks are days, days are weeks.
What matters is love, no?
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Je suis Pompeo.
[ Laughter ]
C'est vrai!
Then, the Trump administration --
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Then, the Trump administration sent military briefers
to Congress to try to convince them that the threat was real.
But that only made things worse with members of both parties
coming away from the briefing furious and unsatisfied.
-I had hoped and expected to receive more information
outlining the legal, factual,
and moral justification for the attack.
I was left somewhat unsatisfied.
-There was no specific information given to us
of the specific attack.
And none was overwhelming that "X" was going to happen.
-My reaction to this briefing was it was sophomoric
and utterly unconvincing.
I was, well, utterly unpersuaded
about any evidence about the imminence of a threat
that was new or compelling.
-We did not get information inside that briefing
that there was a specific, imminent threat.
I think it is likely because it doesn't exist.
-Of course it doesn't exist.
If Donald Trump says, "Trust me, the thing exists,"
it definitely does not exist.
He's like a magician who says he's going to pull a rabbit
out of his hat, looks down,
realizes the rabbit chewed through the hat
and escaped, and says,
[ As Trump ] Trust me, the rabbit's there.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] So because no one believed him,
Trump decided to do his usual routine
of making even more outlandish lies,
changing his story multiple times
within the span of just a few days.
-We did it because they were looking to blow up our embassy.
-Mr. President?
-Blow up the embassy in Baghdad?
Can you provide more details on that plot was?
-No, I think it was obvious.
And he had more than that particular embassy in mind.
He was looking very seriously at our embassies,
and not just the embassy in Baghdad.
-Don't the American people have a right to know
what specifically was targeted
without revealing methods and sources?
-Well, I don't think so.
But we will tell you that probably
it was going to be the embassy in Baghdad.
-Did he have large-scale attacks planned
for other embassies?
And if those were planned,
why can't we reveal that to the American people?
Wouldn't that help your case?
-I can reveal that I believe
it would have been four embassies.
-In the span of two days,
he went from not talking about embassies at all
to saying it was one embassy
to saying it was multiple embassies
to saying it was four embassies.
I know Trump is a bad liar,
but even for him it's obvious he's making stuff up
off the top of his head.
[ As Trump ] What if it was four embassies?
Is that a number where you would all leave me alone?
[ Laughter ]
What if they were Embassy Suites?
I mean that -- That would be bad, right?
That would be a bad thing. [ Applause ]
[ Normal voice ] In fact, Trump's lies have spun
so far out of control that even his own defense secretary,
Mark Esper, had a hard time defending him this weekend
when he made the rounds on the Sunday shows.
-Many members of Congress, from both parties,
have said that none of the briefings
mentioned threats to four U.S. embassies.
Why is president Trump telling this to Fox News,
but the administration is not briefing Congress
on this threat of four embassies
unless there was actually no specific intelligence
that there was a threat to four embassies?
The president never said there was specific intelligence.
What the president said was he believed
that there probably and could have been attacks
against additional embassies.
The president didn't say there was a tangible --
He didn't state a specific piece of evidence.
What he said is he probably --
he believed it could have been --
-Are you saying there wasn't one?
-I didn't see one with regard to four embassies.
-You're the Secretary of Defense.
If it's real, why wouldn't you have seen it?
You think Donald Trump has his own top secret intelligence
he's not sharing with anyone
until he blurts it out on Fox News?
You think he's out there parachuting
into the Iraqi desert with night vision goggles...
[ Laughter ] ...collecting intel on his own.
[ As Trump ] Bad news, guys. Everything's green.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] Now if you're getting a feeling of déjà vu
at this point, it's because we've been through this before
in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.
The Bush administration repeatedly lied
about the intelligence they used to justify that war
in eerily similar ways.
They claimed definitively that Saddam Hussein
had weapons of mass destruction
and that he had ties to the terrorists
who carried out 9/11.
They manipulated intelligence
and concocted all kinds of lies about that intelligence
to justify an immoral and catastrophic war
that destabilized the region and the world.
And they were adamant and unequivocal about it.
Of course, in George W. Bush's case,
he couldn't always keep his talking points straight.
-There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein
now has weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt that he is amassing them
to use against our friends,
against our allies, and against us.
-No terrorist state poses
a greater or more immediate threat to the security
of our people and the stability of the world
than the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
-There's a lot of talk about Iraq on our TV screens.
And there should be.
Because we're trying to figure out
how best to make the world a peaceful place.
There's an old saying in Tennessee,
I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee,
that says fool me once, shame on...
shame on you.
Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
[ Laughter ]
-Is that -- that's how they say it in Texas?
[ Laughter ]
[ As Bush ] There's an old saying in Texas,
give a man a fish, and now...
that man has a fish.
[ Laughter ]
And he can eat that fish.
Or he can keep it as a pet. What I'm saying is...
Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of bass destruction.
[ Laughter and applause ]
[ Normal voice ] Remember when we thought we could never elect
a dumber President than George W. Bush?
And then, yesterday, our current president
tweeted about impeachment and said, "Hose Republicans...
[ Laughter ]
...voted 195-0 against it."
Well, I mean, I guess we can't expect the real-estate developer
to be able to spell the word "house."
[ Laughter ]
Also, he lives in the most famous house in the world.
And because none of his aides will ever tell him he's wrong,
they're gonna have to change all of the signs now.
[ Laughter ]
And then at his rally last week,
Trump could barely get through the standard end
of his stump speech without sounding like he just downed
a bottle of Novocain.
-We will make America wealthy again.
We will make America srrong again.
[ Laughter ]
-Did he just do a keg stand?
If your friend started talking like that,
you'd rush them to the hospital to have their stomach pumped.
He sounds like he just got knocked out in the first round
by Ronda Rousey.
"Donald, don't get up."
[ As Trump, slurring ] I can do it.
I'm feeling srrong again.
[ Laughter ]
[ Normal voice ] And I think even Trump knows on some level
that he can't paper over his lies with charm
because he doesn't have any.
In fact, he seemed to admit as much
in this brief flash of self-awareness
at his rally last week.
-The radical Democrats have never been more extreme
than they are right now.
They are stone-cold crazy.
[ Cheers and applause ]
You know, it's interesting, as I'm saying this stuff,
you know, they want crime, they want chaos.
I'm saying all this stuff. And then I say,
"Geez, now I sort of understand why they hate me." Right?
-Wow. It's like he just had a breakthrough in therapy.
[ Laughter ]
He should had a psychiatrist on stage next to him saying,
"Expand on that." [ Laughter ]
Anyway, the point is the Bush administration
manipulated an intelligence lie
and insisted that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction
and ties to the terrorists who carried out 9/11.
And as just as we've seen with Trump, Pompeo, and Esper,
even when Bush officials admitted there was uncertainty
and disagreement about the intelligence,
they used ominous language to cow people
who dared to question them into backing down.
-You will get different estimates about
precisely how close he is.
We do know that he is actively
pursuing a nuclear weapon.
There will always be some uncertainty
about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon.
But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
-We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun,
that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
-Remember that line?
So many of the most powerful people
in our most powerful institutions
went along with that line, though it was obviously insane.
It's like if your husband said, "I think I have a UTI."
And you were like, "No, you don't."
And he was like, "Okay. Well, I guess we'll find out
when my penis falls off!"
[ Laughter ]
Of course it turns out there was neither
a mushroom cloud nor a smoking gun,
or as Trump has repeatedly called it, "a smocking gun."
That's probably why Trump's speech writers
have never even bothered to write a line like that for him
because they know he'd never be able to pronounce the words.
[ As Trump ] We know don't want the smocking gun
to be a mushroom pizza.
[ Laughter ]
That is something that cannot be...
-Tolerited.
[ Laughter and applause ]
-[ Normal voice ] We've been through this before --
a lawless administration
lying to justify a potentially disastrous
and illegal act of war.
Trump pulled back from the brink last week,
but it's very possible he could do this all over again,
which means Congress must use its power to stop him.
Because as they say in Texas...
-You can't get fooled again.
-This has been "A Closer Look."
[ Cheers and applause ]
♪♪