MAGA-aligned Congressman Byron Donalds (R-FL), an indefatigable Trump supporter who is running — with the President’s endorsement — to succeed Ron DeSantis as Florida Governor, said in an interview this week that the U.S. should not squander the chance to attack Iran.
“If the President is presented with an opportunity where we essentially use some of our weaponry to take out this last nuclear facility in Iran,” Donalds said, “I think it’s an opportunity we have to take.”
Donalds prefaced this assessment by asserting a controversial distinction between the situation in Iran today, which he says presents a nuclear threat that is “crystal clear,” and the inevitable analogy: the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) purportedly possessed by Iraq that triggered the 2003 American invasion of that country.
“We’re not talking about WMDs in Iraq. We’re talking about nukes in Iran,” Donalds said.
Byron Donalds: “We’re not talking about WMDs in Iraq. We’re talking about nukes in Iran. Very different situation. So if the president is presented with an opportunity where we essentially use some of our weaponry to take out this last nuclear facility in Iran, I think it’s an… pic.twitter.com/Io2EilVICo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 20, 2025
But many others, including many influential voices also on the MAGA-aligned right, are very specifically “talking about WMDs in Iraq” — and the costly consequences of using force to prevent a danger that isn’t — and in the case of Iraq, never was — confirmed.
[NOTE: Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in March that though Iran had enriched “unprecedented” amounts of uranium, that the nation was not believed to be actively developing a nuclear weapon.
Keeping his options open and acknowledging that intelligence can change with new data, Trump responded to reminders about Gabbard’s testimony dismissively. “I don’t care what she said,” the President replied this week. “I think they were very close to having one.”]
To such strange bedfellows as liberal Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and MAGA influencers like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, that sounds a lot like — too much like — what George W. Bush believed in 2003, and what then-Joint Chiefs Chair Colin Powell testified to more than two decades ago — false convictions that set the stage for a war in Iraq that, as Sanders puts it, killed nearly 5,000 Americans, wounded 32,000, and “at a cost of roughly 3 trillion dollars” and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.
The “opportunity” — as Donalds describes it — is always present, of course: The U.S. has the weaponry the Congressman references and possesses the capability to deploy it at any time.
But it’s not only a “preventive” aggressive strike that many in the comments are concerned about — just as it was not the original — ostensibly successful — invasion of Iraq that caused the U.S. so much trouble. It’s the aftermath.
As one commenter writes, objecting to the alleged oversimplification of Donalds’s scenario: “Dropping a bunker buster bomb on Iran, is not a military operation, rather an act of war. What would be the next steps after that? Especially if Iran retaliates? Sounds like Afghanistan 2.0.”