Rachel Maddow

They have a huge hold on multiple sectors of the Iranian economy.

And to state the obvious, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is not the kind of force that's gonna go poof if a Donald Trump airstrike manages to kill Iran's Supreme Leader.

If they do kill the Supreme Leader, which appears maybe to be what they tried to do earlier today,

then what will happen?

I mean, this isn't Venezuela.

There's no vice Ayatollah who's gonna step in and take over the top job, except she'll take calls from Marco Rubio.

What will happen then?

If you voted for Donald Trump for president because you believed the hype that he was America first, that he was against foreign wars, that he was definitely against regime change wars in foreign country, well, again, good morning.

I hope you slept well.

But the president in this case says explicitly that this is a war we are waging for regime change.

And the existing leader, Khamenei, who has been in place since 1989, there is no other person of that stature to just pop in place

and say, okay, it's done.

We've made that change.

And so if you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government, if you wanted the beleaguered and oppressed Iranian people to organize very quickly into a new populist political force to rise up against, among other things, the security services there that have been massacring them by the thousands this month and last, if you wanted that to happen,

you probably could have taken some steps to help that happening, to make sure they can organize and can communicate, right?

Maybe you would have turned the internet back on.

And when you, Donald Trump, in your baseball hat, proclaimed on that weird taped message today that the Iranian police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender, they must lay down their weapons, as Donald Trump said this morning at 2.30 a.m.,

if that was what you wanted to happen, because you wanted the domestic security situation to become less dangerous for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government.

If you actually wanted to make that happen, instead of just saying it, you as the U.S.

government, maybe you as the U.S.