MS NOW's Chris Hayes hits Trump's 'litany of lies' with lightning round Iran fact-check

MS NOW's Chris Hayes broke down all the key points of President Donald Trump's speech on the Iran war on Wednesday evening — and tore apart most of the major false claims made during the address.

"That was the President of the United States with a 19-minute address from the Blue Room there in the White House, addressing the war with Iran," said Hayes. "If you were expecting something new, you did not get it. It was a litany of lies that he's told before."

To start with, said Hayes, Trump said "that Barack Obama gave the Iranians billions of dollars. He didn't. It was repatriated assets that had been seized by the United States pursuant to that negotiated deal. That Iran was on the doorstep of a nuclear weapon. There's literally no one who says they were. In fact, he himself said that the program had been obliterated, that there was a desire perhaps to rebuild it, but there was no doorstep that it was on. He said that 45,000 Iranians had been killed by the regime in the latest round of protests. That is an estimate that I have heard nowhere. The highest estimate I've heard is 35,000."

Even that figure, said Hayes, "is contested, very difficult to ascertain. There were many, many people killed by this regime, but 45,000 is past even the most aggressive estimates I've seen about that."

Trump didn't stop there, Hayes noted, following up with various threats and demands.

"He then basically said what he has been saying, that the objectives have been accomplished, that they have been decimated, that they will continue to pursue for 2 or 3 weeks, that they didn't seek regime change," said Hayes. "But the regime has changed that. If there are no negotiations, they will. The United States will send Iran — they, Iran as a country, meaning its 90 million people — back to the Stone Age where they belong and will commence, in the absence of negotiations, bombing electric plants, which would be a war crime. Those are civilian infrastructure and oil installments, which he said they have not done. Two to 3 weeks was the timeline he gave for that."

"He reminded everyone with a very long litany of other words the U.S. had been involved in, including World War II, where I think the reasons and objectives that were were pretty clear that they were longer than the 33 days that have this war. He also reiterated, we should say, what has become the line from the White House about the Strait of Hormuz: that is to say that the U.S. doesn't have any interest into it, gets no oil imported via that Strait, and that the countries that are suffering because of its closure will just have to go in there and take it as what he told them, take it, he instructed them."

"He also said that it will open up naturally when the war ends, very similar to what he said about COVID going away naturally back in 2020," added Hayes.

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