The Rachel Maddow Show
MS NOW's live breaking coverage with Rachel Maddow of U.S. attacks on Iran
28 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Good afternoon, I'm Rachel Maddow. It is 1 p.m. Eastern time and you are joining MSNOW's ongoing coverage of the United States having apparently started a war with Iran for some reason. Your guess, your personal guess, sitting at home watching me right now, your personal guess is as good as any as to why the president of the United States has just started this war.
In terms of pure rational deduction about what he is doing here, We can basically rule out all of the reasons he has said he's doing it. Is Iran on the precipice of having ballistic missiles that can reach the United States? Absolutely not. The United States is very far from Iran.
One might even say it's a whole continent away, which means a ballistic missile launched from Iran to hit us here would have to be an intercontinental ballistic missile. Does Iran have ICBMs? Does Iran have intercontinental ballistic missiles? No, it does not. And there is no known evidence or even serious allegation that Iran is anywhere near developing that technology anytime soon.
Even Trump's secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has recently admitted that, admitting that the threat is only that maybe, quote, one day Iran might have that kind of capability. One day. Just like you or I might one day learn to fly or to time travel. Is Iran a week away from industrial-grade uranium enrichment?
As the president's diminutive real estate friend Steve Witkoff asserted this week when he was asked about the Iran talks he is inexplicably part of on behalf of the United States government and the people of the United States, despite his only relevant experience and training being that he is an old real estate friend of President Donald Trump.
Is Iran, as Steve Witkoff says, a week away from achieving industrial-grade uranium enrichment for their nuclear program? No, they are not. No, they are not. Not only has there been no American or international evidence or intelligence made public that suggests even that they are doing that, but even the Trump administration says explicitly that that is not happening.
Marco Rubio on Wednesday at a press conference in St. Kitts and Nevis told reporters, quote, they are not enriching right now.
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Chapter 2: What triggered the U.S. attacks on Iran?
So why is this happening? Have we just started a war with Iran because they have got some advanced nuclear program that's rushing toward a bomb? Ask President Donald Trump, who insists that the last time he ordered the bombing of Iran in June, that, quote, totally obliterated their nuclear program.
It's hard to say that anything totally obliterated, gone, pulverized, erased from the earth might now suddenly be back again. And so, therefore, a war must urgently start today. So, what are we doing here? It's not that they're about to get us with intercontinental ballistic missiles. It's not that they are enriching uranium to such a degree that it is dangerous and we must stop that.
It's not that their nuclear program, which Trump says he obliterated, has somehow unobliterated itself and is now a pressing danger again. Why did we just go to war with Iran?
The president has said a couple of times in recent days that he just wants the Iranian government to say the words that they are not pursuing a nuclear bomb, suggesting that if they would just say that, that would be enough to stop the United States from starting a war with them. Well, the Iranian government actually, over and over again, keeps saying that they are not developing a nuclear bomb.
They will say it whenever you like. They say it whenever they are asked. So that does not appear to be the reason either. So why do you think President Donald Trump has just done this? Why do you think he has just started a war with Iran? Is it because his heart bleeds empathetically on a human level?
for the protesters in Iran who have been killed by their own government in such huge numbers in January and February of this year? Is it because Donald Trump really feels for the Iranian people? Is it because his heart throbs with a passionate support for the right of free speech and the right of people everywhere to protest against their own government and not face violence because of it?
Is that what you think? If so, good morning. I hope you have slept well for this past decade in which you've been dead to the world. But, I mean, just suspend disbelief for a moment. Just suppose that the reason the United States of America has just started this war with Iran is...
Because, as the president said today in his weird prerecorded video message in a baseball hat and a suit jacket that the White House released at 2.30 in the morning, the president said in that stilted, strange statement, squinting at the camera with his eyes shaded by the gigantic white hat he was wearing, he said that he's doing this because he wants the people of Iran to rise up and overthrow their despotic government.
At his instruction. And maybe they will. Maybe they will try.
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Chapter 3: What are the reasons behind President Trump's decision to start a war with Iran?
But Iran is a huge, complex country. It is 92 million people. That is more than triple the population of Iraq or Afghanistan when we started our disastrous regime change wars in those two countries two decades ago.
Iran has considerable regular military forces, but it also has a huge revolutionary guard force, which has effectively its own army, its own navy, its own intelligence service, its own special forces.
It also plays a huge role in the massive, suffocating, brutal domestic security services that are happy to terrorize the Iranian people in the best of times and to massacre the Iranian people in the worst of times, which they have done in the last eight weeks. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has massive economic interests. 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.,
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Chapter 4: What evidence supports claims about Iran's missile capabilities?
And so the world could reach them, too.
If you actually wanted the Iranian people to have a chance rising up against the regime that has oppressed them for so many decades, you might not have gutted the crucial Farsi language voice of America communications platform and put it in the hands of a soft focus election denier, local news anchor, who is most famous for proclaiming the fraudulence of American elections.
If this is a regime change war, as Trump says it is, Because Trump is seriously hoping the Iranian people will complete the job for him. It is worth knowing that there has been no serious or even unserious effort by the United States to make it possible, let alone plausible, for any uprising by the Iranian people to succeed. And so why did Donald Trump just start this war? Why is this happening?
Qui bono, right? Who benefits? It's always useful to start that question in any country. Who benefits? Who wants Iran bombed off the map and for their own reasons? Who are Iran's rivals and enemies? Perennially, it's the Gulf Arab states, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
You know, Qatar, a country that just gave Donald Trump a really, really nice $400 million plane, really a gilded flying palace for his own use, both during the presidency, during his presidency and after Trump plans to take that plane with him and keep using it after he leaves office, if he ever leaves office. And you remember the United Arab Emirates.
famous for recently structuring a totally pointless crypto financial transaction so that $2 billion of it would be stuffed into the Trump family's otherwise worthless brand new crypto financial firm. And of course, you remember the Saudis who stuffed another $2 billion into the pockets of Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, just as Trump's first term in office came to a close.
You might remember enough people were alarmed about that when it happened that the Trump administration Folks actually sort of bothered to come up with an excuse for what made that OK. They said, don't worry, Jared will never again work for the U.S. government. He's never coming back to Washington. So it's OK that he's taken all this money from the Saudis now.
We will never have to worry about having somebody involved in U.S. policy who has also just been given billions of dollars by Saudi Arabia, apparently for no reason. Well, that was the explanation when he took all that money from the Saudis at the end of Trump's first term.
And now today, who has been leading the negotiations on behalf of the United States government with Iran before we just started this war with them today? I mean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was in St. Kitts this week.
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Chapter 5: Is Iran close to achieving industrial-grade uranium enrichment?
It wasn't him. No, it was Jared Kushner. president's son-in-law, recently paid billions of dollars by Iran's chief rival, and nevertheless sitting there alongside Trump's tiny real estate friend, Steve Witkoff, who has sought recently to improve his considerable family fortunes by going to Qatar to seek money from its sovereign wealth fund. Weird that those talks didn't work, right?
It's like if you were having a backyard dispute with your neighbor, you know, hey, your new fence crosses over on the property line, comes over into my yard. That tree you just cut down, that hedge you just cut down, hey, that was mine. You're having a neighborly dispute with your neighbor on your block. And the cops break down your door with a battering ram.
They arrest you and your whole family. They ransack your house and then they light it a fire and bulldoze it. And they tell your neighbor, hey, it's all done. You can take his whole backyard and you can take his house now, too. And as you're trying to figure out why this has just happened, you come to learn that your neighbor has been paying massive bribes to the police in your town.
Oh, that's what's going on. I mean, there's a lot of attention on Israel, and indeed Israel and the United States have worked together in the bombing campaign, not only the one that started today, but the campaign against Iran in June. But it is the Gulf Arab statesā who are arrayed against Iran, who want Iran removed as their regional rival.
It is those countries that have been assiduously buying up members of the Trump family and the Trump administration with just astonishing amounts of cash in recent years and particularly in recent months. And now, for that low, low price, they appear to have rented the services of the United States military to start a war that they want but that the American people do not.
and that our American government hasn't bothered to explain in terms that are even internally consistent, let alone rational or sound. Why did Donald Trump today just start a war with Iran? You tell me. The New York Times editorial board writes today that in this second term, Trump's, quote, appetite for military intervention grows with the eating. And that seems observably true.
Iran doesn't have ballistic missiles that can reach us. Iran has not achieved some kind of breakthrough in nuclear enrichment that is a new sudden emergency. Iran isn't about to have a nuclear bomb. And I think it's fair to say this is not about Donald Trump's emotional desire to provide support to the Iranian people. If it were, we might actually be supporting the Iranian people. So why is it?
Maybe it's for oil, as the president daydreams himself into another 19th century war fantasy of conquering some foreign land he doesn't understand or care about, but he would like to rob them of their natural resources. Maybe he thinks Iran and its proud 92 million people will happily and easily become a new colony in an empire, an empire helmed by an American emperor. Maybe that's what he thinks.
But as this now becomes the seventh country Trump has bombed just since being back in office for one year, cui bono? Who benefits? It seems like a disturbingly easy question to answer. Why has the US government been pushed in this direction? Follow the money. Why is Donald Trump willing to let that happen? Well, with this president, sadly,
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Chapter 6: What might be the implications of regime change in Iran?
It earns him not only close attention, but even occasionally plaudits from the very serious people who are professionally inclined to believe that there's some rationale, some strategery, some good thinking behind the start of every war, particularly in the Middle East. Starting a war, launching airstrikes, doing this sort of thing, it gets him a ton of attention.
He gets to do it unilaterally, he contends. Naturally, there's no question that he would seek a declaration of war from Congress or even an authorization for the use of military force. He sees war as something he gets to do on his own say-so in a baseball hat from home that is exciting, that is controversial, that is all about him, and not for nothing, it's the world's greatest change of subject.
Today, Saturday, is a weekday, it's a school day in Iran as we start to get reports of the damages inside not just Tehran but elsewhere in Iran. The internet is off in Iran. The government in Iran hasn't advised its own people what to do as American airstrikes start bombarding multiple cities.
Donald Trump, when he was a private citizen, repeatedly in 2011, 2012, and 2013, said that then-President Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to help his political prospects. He kept saying over and over again that Barack Obama was about to start a war with Iran in order to get reelected, in order to help the Democratic Party's political prospects.
Donald Trump was wrong about that. Barack Obama didn't start a war with Iran. But we know why Trump thought Obama should have done it. He said so. He said that was exactly what Obama would need to do in order to get reelected, in order to put wind in his political sails. We know what Donald Trump thought would be the salutary domestic political effect of a U.S. president starting a war with Iran.
And now today, as he is facing domestic political disaster in this year's elections, now today our wildly unpopular U.S. president has started that war himself. Why do you think he did it? Stay with us. Reporters and analysts standing by on day one of Donald Trump's new war with Iran. We'll be back in 90 seconds.
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more.
That's all on The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
Welcome back to our ongoing coverage here at MSNOW of President Donald Trump's new war with Iran. Let me bring you up to speed on what we understand is happening at this hour. We actually have a new statement from U.S. Military Central Command just in the last few minutes. It says in part, quote, U.S. and partner forces began striking targets at 1.15 a.m.
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Chapter 7: How are Iran's military capabilities impacting regional stability?
UAE's government says at least one person was killed there by falling debris from an Iranian ballistic missile attack. The Fairmont Palm Hotel in Dubai caught on fire after being hit by a projectile of some sort. Local authorities say the fire is under control.
Bahrain's Interior Ministry says several residential buildings in its capital were targeted and that firefighting and rescue operations were underway. Meanwhile, Israel says it has intercepted multiple waves of missiles and drones from Iran after it claims to have struck 500 targets inside Iran today. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to deliver a statement in Israel any moment.
Iran says it has closed the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow channel through which fully one-fifth of the world's oil is transported. The U.S. government's maritime agency has advised American commercial ships to stay away from the Persian Gulf region. Hundreds of flights have been canceled across the Middle East amid widespread airspace closures. The U.N.
Security Council is convening an emergency meeting at 4 p.m. Eastern today. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has condemned the attack on Iran. A State Department official tells MSNOW that the State Department has set up a task force to assist American citizens in the region, though... It's not clear what that consists of.
Unlike the last time the Trump administration bombed Iran, this time around there was no order to evacuate non-essential personnel or families from embassies and bases in the region. This is obviously a fast-moving, fast-changing situation. We'll keep you updated as we know more. But joining us now live from Jerusalem is Adam Parsons. He's Middle East correspondent for Sky News.
Adam, I really appreciate you being with us. Thank you.
Yeah, no problems at all. Evening from Jerusalem, a tense city. As I speak to you now, I can hear the sound of fighter jets going ahead, probably heading in that direction, which is towards Tehran. We've today, tonight, seen Israel launching the biggest missile. aerial assault, about 200 jets that it has ever launched.
So this has been a day that has, as you've been outlining there, escalated very, very quickly.
Adam, what can you tell us about the scale of these strikes? We obviously have very limited visibility on the ground in Iran in terms of the impact of these strikes. But from what you are understanding of the Israeli government's action, the Israeli military's actions, and what you can compare about what the U.S.
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Chapter 8: What are the potential consequences of U.S. military actions in Iran?
the Houthis in Yemen. But those are three things we've heard a lot before. Now, I think what we have is an American president saying to the Iranian people, this is the chance for regime change and saying this is a once in a generation opportunity. And what that means is that for the Iranian regime, they will see this. as a truly existential threat, as a fight for their survival.
Now, what we do know is that Iran has said for a while that if it is attacked, then it will respond in such a way to turn an attack on Iran into a regional conflict. And that is what they appear to be trying to do by attacking not just here in Israel, but also in countries throughout the region. So far, really, it is ones who are allies of the United States and attacking, for instance, U.S.
base in Bahrain But this is about Iran flexing its muscles. At the moment, I have to say, Israeli sources are saying they think that the Iranian response has actually been lesser than they anticipated. But they also expect it to be stepped up. Some of the rhetoric coming through on Iranian telegram channels echoes that. So I think there is a feeling that this is the start.
We're nowhere near the middle of this. This is the way it has kicked off. This has been large scale, but we are simply seeing the first act of what is going to be a long drama.
Adam Parsons, Sky News Middle East correspondent, joining us from Jerusalem late where it is late there tonight. Adam, I really appreciate you being here with us. Please stay safe. Thank you. Joining us next is going to be Ben Rhodes, who is deputy national security advisor under President Obama. We've got a lot to get to this hour. Stay with us. We'll be right back.
Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick, and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walz, Katonji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more.
That's all on The New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
This is from Senator Tim Kaine, who is a senior Democrat who is on the Armed Services Committee. Senator Kaine writing today, quote, has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?
Is he too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check until he ripped it up during his first term? Senator Kaine saying today that these strikes on Iran are, quote, a colossal mistake and, quote, a dangerous, unnecessary and idiotic action. An idiotic action, Senator Tim Kaine calls it.
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