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10 Minute Drill
Monday Bonus: Iran Strike Explained: What Happened, Why Trump Acted, Democrat Response & What Happens Next
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A
It's Monday morning and it has been about two days since President Trump announced that we were carrying out attacks against Iran. We bring you everything you need to know in a very special bonus Iran focused Monday morning episode of 10 Minute Drill. Everybody get up. Get up.
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The story of America is the story of an adventure.
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I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. We are a nation under God, and I believe God intended for us to be free. First off, what happened on Saturday morning? People woke up to a video that had been posted around 3am of President Trump announcing that that very morning we had begun carrying out airstrikes across Iran in concert with Israel.
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A short time ago, the United States military began major combat operations in Iran. Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.
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One key part of this video was President Trump explaining the long context and the very long pretext that led us to this point, making clear that this was not one, starting a new war. Two, this was not President Trump's war or fight. This was a conflict that had been brewing for almost 50 years. A little bit of history that we'll get into. But the third part of his video, which was eight minutes long, that was incredibly important was his call to the people of Iran to take over their government because of the role that they're going to play in the future.
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B
Finally, to the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Take over your government. It will be yours to take.
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Celebrations broke out across the United States and across the entire world as people learned of the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, the largest Iranian populations outside of the Middle East. You see the gathering there behind her. Julia, how is the Iranian community responding?
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The celebration is striking.
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When is the last time you saw people in Israel and Iran dancing on the streets in excitement for the first time in their lives? Many here are expressing optimism for a new life in Iran. We all want to say thank you to President Trump. This is the only person who support us in the last 50 years. The world is going to be in a better place. Thank you, President Trump. Thank you, Israel. So after the United States had launched their first round of attacks that took out the Ayatollah, took out former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and dozens of top Iranian leaders, Iran responded by beginning to shoot missiles in every direction to to try and target US Military assets, but angering virtually every other country in the region. Now, a lot of the rest of the world is united with the United States and Israel against Iran. Part 2 Today is the pretext. We talked a little bit about the history of this, the fact that this conflict with Iran has been brewing for 50 years. In that time, Iran has funded terrorist activities against America and against the rest of the Western world. We've had thousands of American personnel killed, many tens of thousands more wounded by bullets that were paid for by Iran. And even Most recently with October 7, 46Americans were killed in the Hamas attack that was funded by Iran. We know that Iran tried to plot an assassination attempt against President Trump while he was running for president. So there is considerable pretext up to this point. But the other thing in this that's really important to understand is the diplomatic track that failed here. We've been talking now for several months, all the way back from Operation Midnight Hammer, but even in December, when protesters first took to the streets, about President Trump's focus first on trying to find a diplomatic solution, a deal. Axios has a great piece on when this finally fell apart. Two months, two tracks. How Trump chose war with Iran. In the room, the Iranians hadn't come close to even the most flexible US Position. After the first session, Kushner and Witkoff called Vice President Vance on a secure line and told him the gaps were still wide. A second round that evening changed nothing. Kushner and Witkoff saw that the Iranian proposal was BS and only meant to buy time. A senior US Official said there wasn't any there there to work with. Toria Coates of the Heritage Foundation, a brilliant, brilliant foreign policy scholar, said, certainly
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President Trump has given every opportunity for the regime in Iran to come to the table and make a reasonable deal, what he calls a meaningful deal. And, and in, in this case, I mean, we spent four years in the first term working on this, working on the maximum pressure campaign. All the critics were predicting that the President wouldn't act. He was being tricked by the Iranians. Absolutely not. He was getting everything in place that he needed to execute this extraordinary strike.
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Ted Cruz also laid out how diplomacy was attempted and failed.
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Why not choose diplomacy?
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Because the diplomacy was an abject failure. The Iranians approached the diplomacy with arrogance, which with absolute hubris. They said they would not stop enriching no matter what. They were going to continue to enrich uranium. And then what was one of the most notable quotes on this was John Fetterman, who talked about how Democrats have had a lot to say about keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but are mighty quiet when someone actually did something to stop it.
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I'm tired of seeing people, you know, go on social media and saying, we can never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear bomb and Israel always deserves insecurity and they deserve to exist. Well, if you're not willing to do about it, you know, then it's. It must just be empty words.
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Democrat responses. Now, Guy Benson, a good friend of the program, had a great tweet explaining exactly how most of these Democrats are sort of doing a plug and play response. The emerging consensus among many elected Democrats is some version of, to be clear, Iran's outlaw regime is deeply evil, exports terrorism around the world, pursues genocidal nuclear weapons, is drenched in American blood, and slaughters its own civilians en masse. But da, da. Which is what we've seen from virtually all of them. Let's begin with Kamala Harris. Now, you'll remember during the campaign, she said she believed Iran was one of the greatest threats to America considered to be our greatest adversary.
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I think there's an obvious one in mind, which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands.
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So if you have proof that Iran is building a nuclear weapon, would you take military action?
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I'm not going to talk about hypotheticals
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at this moment, but here she is now.
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Donald Trump has dragged us into a war the American people do not want. He has put American troops in harm's way. I unequivocally oppose this war of choice, and everyone should not.
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Super surprising. Here's Mark Warner.
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Listen, I will be the first to acknowledge having the supreme leader and other major leaders of the Iranian regime eliminated is good for the region, good for the world. I think the President has started a war of choice. I saw no intelligence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America.
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Now, when he says he saw no intelligence suggesting that this was imminent, you have to remember that nobody's been sharing intelligence with Mark Warner for quite a while because he's consistently suspected of leaking classified information to attack his political opponents. But another person in the sort of opposed to anything Trump does space is Mark Kelly. He posted a video and also tweeted out this. People who've never served are often the quickest to start dropping bombs without a plan for what's next. The American people have seen this play out before and they're tired of it. Trump is sending our service members into harm's way without a clear explanation or an end goal. I think we all can agree Mark Kelly's made very clear that he hates President Trump and anything that he would try and do And I do think that part of this public affairs battle is going to be President Trump trying to explain the history and pretext as to why this was necessary and Democrats defending terrorists. And to take that a step further, you have the pro terror wing of the Democrats first. Rashida Tlaib tweeted this. Both the US and genocidal Israel doesn't care about the laws. This is who they are. Many people pointed out that it was strange for her to say they about the United States. As a citizen of the United States and as a member of the United States Congress, she does not view herself as a part of the United States. Maybe that's a part of the problem. Already discussed these political lines being drawn. I wanted to give just a quick snapshot of public opinion. You'll remember that when President Trump took out Maduro in Venezuela, first chatter suggested people were going to hate this. It felt like we were stomping into another war that we had no plan for. But what we found is polling overwhelmingly showed people supported it. For one, as people got to understand how terrible Maduro was, they said, hmm, probably a good idea that someone in our hemisphere with that much capacity for danger and violence against America is no longer in power. But two, they respected a well carried out operation to get rid of a threat. But also there's a rally around the flag effect. And I think that we're actually going to see that quite a bit in this operation as well, particularly as we see the rest of the world rally and mobilize around our cause. But first, Politico had a poll. Trump voters support military intervention in more countries. 65% of Trump voters say the US should take military action in at least one country, according to a new Politico poll. And that poll found that of all the countries that America should take in intervention, and Iran was the highest. And so there's been a ton of discussion about whether President Trump's supporters, particularly in the sort of MAGA base, would go along with this. A lot of polling is showing us they're actually quite comfortable with it, particularly after the case President Trump has laid out for why this was necessary. Insider advantage. Do you approve President Trump's actions today in Iran? 54% approve. Only 37% disapprove. Now, gray House, in a poll that was released exclusively to the Washington Reporter, went a step further. Further, a full 86% of Republicans would either strongly support or somewhat support the type of move that Trump just carried out in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Today, the topic of what comes next. One thing that will impact the public opinion around this is casualties. Tragically, we've already heard of three American service members losing their lives. This from CNN. The three U.S. service members killed in action as part of Operation Epic Fury died in a suspected drone strike early Sunday in Kuwait at a US Military base. President Trump took to video and sent his condolences to the family, but also acknowledged this would be a tough fight.
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Earlier today, CENTCOM shared the news that three US Military service members have been killed in action. As one nation, we grieve for the true American patriots who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation.
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In his words, and in the words of many Republicans, it will be worth it to get rid of the world's preeminent spirit, sponsor of terror that has taken so many American lives over the years. Now we move to Washington where there's going to be a heated debate about war powers with virtually every Democrat who's made a statement about this thus far saying that the attack was illegal, that the president didn't have the authority to do this. Mike Lawlor, representative from New York, had a great tweet, I believe, responding to their claims. Since many of my Democrat colleagues don't seem to understand the War Powers act, it's very simple. The president must notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops or commencing an attack. The president must then withdraw troops within 60 to 90 days unless Congress declares war in this instant. Congress was notified in advance and briefed before the strike on Iran. A full classified briefing will be forthcoming. Now Congress can pass a concurrent resolution ordering the troops to be withdrawn at any time, which is what Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna are trying to do. But under Article 2 and as commander in chief, the president has the authority to act. The notion that this strike is illegal, that the president needed congressional authority, is wrong. Furthermore, Biden and Obama conducted numerous strikes in numerous countries without Congress and none of the people screaming now seem to have any objections. The other thing that I just want to flag at the end of this here is a reminder. The Department of Homeland Security is shut down. You'll remember Democrats shut it down, took money away from it in protest of ICE operations in even though ICE is fully funded. We've talked about the absurdity of that over the last several weeks. But now that there is global conflict happening, Democrats look pretty dumb for that. Speaker Johnson has announced that they're going to hold votes to try and force it back open to try and keep the homeland safe. This from Bill Melujian, breaking FOX News has learned that Speaker Johnson just announced on a House GOP conference call that the House will vote on DHS funding again this week. And there will be a House vote on War Power's resolution on Iran likely on Thursday. So again, this is going to be an eventful week ahead with continued airstrikes, continued rallying around the American flag from European countries, from neighboring countries around Iran who are upset that they've been attacked without any provocation of their own, with Republicans trying to make this case to the American people that this was absolutely necessary. That's all the time we've got for today, but we will be back tomorrow with another full length episode in any update updates on everything happening. We are thankful for you. Have a great day.