Joe DePaoloMay 26th, 2026, 9:36 am

Joe Scarborough revealed Tuesday that he personally warned President Donald Trump against going into Iran in a private phone call.

In a scorching commentary on Morning Joe, Scarborough said that the president was repeatedly advised against an Iran incursion.

“Let me tell you what experts told everybody about Iran — don’t go!” Scarborough said. “Don’t go into Iran! Because if you go into Iran, they’ll cut off the strait immediately! … People have been saying it since the early 1980s. You can’t do it because they’ll cut off this strait. And yet they did it anyway. So the so-called experts were warning him — David Ignatius, every day on this show, every day on this show leading up to the war, what did he say? ‘Mr. President, with all due respect, sir, Iran is not Venezuela.'”

The Morning Joe host then shared with his MS NOW audience that he actually made a personal appeal to the commander in chief.

“I told him on the phone, ‘Iran is not Venezuela!'” Scarborough said. “‘Don’t listen to Lindsey Graham! Don’t do it! Iran is not Venezuela!’ But he thought it was. Experts told him it wasn’t. If he had talked to anybody on the Iran desk in the CIA, they would have said, ‘No, this is a nightmare. You will get entangled in a quagmire there. Don’t go!’ And so, experts… sometimes, actually, you need to pick up the phone and call one or two of them, because they will stop you from getting involved in what Bob Kagan, an expert, says could be one of the greatest military defeats in the past century.”

Watch above, via MS NOW.

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