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MSNBC Guest: Trump’s Iran Strikes Were 'Authoritarian, Performative'
Monday on MSNBC’s 11th Hour, host Stephanie Ruhle cued up one of the far left’s favorite history professors — Boston College’s Heather Cox Richardson — to weigh on President Trump’s weekend military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, but all it boiled down to was a partisan screed about Trump violating the Constitution from someone Ruhle dubbed “one of the best” at...dispensing objective analysis?
Asked specifically by Ruhle about what she had written on the pattern she saw in Trump’s actions, Richardson readily responded:
What I wrote was that it fit the pattern of disregarding the Constitution, and I think it really does that. But I think that's also part of a larger pattern that has been part of Republican Party history for the last 40 years at least. And that is a reliance on the idea of dominating others through force, through violence.
Time for a bit of a fact check.
Richardson tried to make the Republican Party out to be a bunch of warbent, domineering politicians whose primary policy was violence. Of course, every president of the last 40 years, Republican or Democrat, was involved in some form of military operation. President Obama, for example, ordered the dropping of nearly 25,000 bombs on different parts of the Middle East, some of which resulted in civilian casualties.
Not only that, Obama’s strikes were also ordered without direct approval from Congress, a move that received nowhere near as much pushback at the time. Neither president’s attacks were unconstitutional, but the media can ignore precedent when it comes to pushing their agenda.
Trump’s actions, according to Richardson, were nothing more than performative violence, an attempt to flex his presidential power by stepping past Congress. In her eyes, this was another try at doing what the Flag Day military parade failed to do, even as she acknowledged the exaggerated criticisms the parade received.
Ironically, despite the fact he did the same thing as Trump, Richardson was full of praise for Obama, whom she interviewed the night before:
What really stuck out to me, I think, was the degree to which former President Obama is trying to hold open a space for liberal democracy. And by that, I don't mean Democrats, and I don't mean the liberalism that the right wing has turned into an epithet for the most of Americans.
I mean the idea of a democracy that protects American individuals, that protects liberties, and makes sure that we are not crushed by forces like industrialization, like AI, like oligarchs, like people who are forcing Americans into smaller and smaller lives. And there's a lot of pressure, I think, from the right wing now, to destroy our democracy and replace it with authoritarianism.
Richardson’s notion that Republicans were putting pressure to replace democracy with authoritarianism was absurd. Her main evidence for this was Trump’s bypassing Congress to authorize the strikes, which the same man she cited also did.
As per usual, the guest brought on to explain Trump’s actions ultimately made her block into tiresome partisan bombs. Richardson praised Obama for combatting authoritarianism, ignoring that he did the exact same thing that made Trump authoritarian. In contrast, she argued that Trump’s attacks were purely performative.
The transcript is below. Click "expand" to read.
MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle
June 23, 2025
11:47 p.m. EST
STEPHANIE RUHLE: With everything going on tonight, with Trump's ceasefire announcement, we wanted to zoom out and get some perspective. My next guest is one of the very best when it comes to that. Earlier this evening I spoke to Heather Cox Richardson, professor of American history at Boston College. She writes the popular newsletter Letters from an American and is the author of the New York Times best selling book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Watch this.
(Cuts to Video)
Heather, I am so glad you are with us tonight. You wrote that while there is still a lot that is unclear, President Trump's decision to carry out these strikes on Iran does fit a clear pattern for him. Can you explain?
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Well, what I wrote was that it fit the pattern of disregarding the Constitution, and I think it really does that. But I think that's also part of a larger pattern that has been part of Republican Party history for the last 40 years at least. And that is a reliance on the idea of dominating others through force, through violence.
And you see it really, especially in the attack on Iran, because, in fact, the Republican Party has called for attacks on Iran since at least 2007. You might remember Arizona Senator John McCain, who was running at that point for the presidential nomination for 2008, talking about bombing Iran with, you know, sort of a ditty from the Beach Boys, “Barbara Ann.”
But the Obama administration actually negotiated between 2013 and 2015 an agreement with Iran that worked, you know, we all believed that it worked, that there was inspection of Iran's nuclear sites and so on that made sure they didn't enrich uranium, which was the concern about their developing of nuclear technologies.
But in fact, the Republicans continually insisted that that was not sufficient and, of course, Donald Trump tore that agreement up in 2018 when he got into office. And now, finally, they have bombed Iran. To what end? It's not at all clear. But now that actual fact of bombing has been enough for President Donald Trump today to declare everything is over and now we can all have peace.
RUHLE: Isn't that extraordinary, though, because many people, especially many Republicans, who have wanted us to make this move on Iran for years are saying great, mission accomplished, but we still don't know what lies ahead.
RICHARDSON: Right? And we still don't know what damage was done by those strikes.
There's certainly evidence that's been reposted in a bunch of places today that, in fact, the Iranians had moved the enriched uranium out of the facilities, especially Fordow, where It had been before Trump started posting on social media that he was going to attack Iran. So we don't actually know what happened There's a lot of performance here.
The idea that simply by flexing America's military muscles, we have accomplished what the Republicans and Donald Trump wanted to, whether or not that's actually the case, we're not going to know for quite a while.
RUHLE: Let's just think about the last two weeks, right. One weekend, we saw huge protests across the country against his administration while the president held a military parade. The very next weekend, he launched unprecedented military strikes. What was your initial reaction when you heard Trump made this move on Saturday?
RICHARDSON: Well, I'm laughing because don't you feel like every week in this administration has been at least a month long? So, you look back at the No Kings Protests in which more than 5 million people turned out to protest this administration and this president happening on the same day as what was actually not necessarily a badly conceived military parade, which, you know, was supposed to look at the different eras of the American military. But of course, that became known as Trump's birthday parade and it was an utter fizzle.
And then from that, immediately we moved into the idea that Trump was going to flex his muscles again in what looks very much like a performative demonstration of might, of violence, of this sort of idea that just by flexing your muscles and exerting power over somebody, that you can get what you want.
And the issue with that is that it is, first of all, performative, but second of all, as we all know from our own lives, simply insisting that you're going to get your way by hurting somebody or by dominating somebody very rarely works. And in this case, we had the example directly in front of us of an actual negotiation amongst a number of parties, a number of different countries that worked.
We had a number of years of proof that it worked, tore it up in favor of violence, and now simply Trump declaring that this is going to stop Iran's nuclear program may or may not be the case. But we have no proof at all yet that it has been the case.
So we're looking at this moment where we're really seeing a test of this idea of, sort of, performance domination, on the one hand, versus the real hard work of negotiation and figuring out how to live with people And being able to see, well, we know that the negotiations worked, is this sort of performative violence going to work, and we'll find out over the next several years.
RUHLE: There has been a lot of talk in the last week, really, about how these moves in general against Iran has split the MAGA base. Do you think that will last or will they come together?
RICHARDSON: I think it will depend entirely on whether or not this really does stop here and now. You know, for a while yesterday, President Donald Trump was talking about regime change. If we get involved in another war in the Middle East, that's not going to play well with anybody. It's certainly not going to play well with MAGA. We know the American people are overwhelmingly against having another involvement in a Middle Eastern war.
On the other hand, if this really does end today on all parties, I think that MAGA will simply forget it ever happened and say, “oh, it was a great victory” and walk away.
RUHLE: Last week you had a rare opportunity to sit down with former President Barack Obama. What stuck out to you about what he said?
RICHARDSON: What really stuck out to me, I think, was the degree to which former President Obama is trying to hold open a space for liberal democracy. And by that, I don't mean Democrats, and I don't mean the liberalism that the right wing has turned into an epithet for the most of Americans. I mean the idea of a democracy that protects American individuals, that protects liberties, and makes sure that we are not crushed by forces like industrialization, like AI, like oligarchs, like people who are forcing Americans into smaller and smaller lives.
And there's a lot of pressure, I think, from the right wing now, to destroy our democracy and replace it with authoritarianism. There is, to some degree, discussion on the part of the far left about pushing back against democracy and replacing it with something else.
But there are increasing number of voices in the middle that are simply trying to hold that space open, and having the former. president in a public forum talking about a big tent, talking about protecting the ability of people from all political parties to come together to protect democracy, talking about pushing back against the far-right and the far left, holding that space open, I thought, was a really important stepping stone to what must come next in American democracy, which is beginning to articulate new ways to think about taking our democracy into the 21st century, to take on the really big issues that we've got with things like climate change .
So I loved that he was out there. I loved that he was, you know, I sort of am sitting here making a sign of a space being open with my hands because I felt like he was holding that space open for other people to jump into it.
RUHLE: Heather, it was a fascinating conversation. I'm glad we got to see just some of it. Thank you for joining me tonight, I appreciate it.
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