Donald Trump tried to answer a reporter’s questions about his disastrous war with Iran before bailing for the exit midway through his response.
The president, 80, had just disembarked Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland after attending Sunday’s World Cup final in New Jersey when a journalist in the press gaggle asked him about the conflict.
“On Iran, Mr. President, you said at the start of the war it would be four or five weeks,” the reporter said. “Now it’s nearly five months?”
Trump immediately shot back that the reporter had somehow undersold the scale of the task at hand. “This is a far bigger job that we’re doing,” he said. “We were doing a little job, stopping them from having a certain capability. Now, we’re just ending it.”
“It’s really not the same thing,” he went on, clarifying that “what we’re doing now is we’re ending any chance where they could have a nuclear missile.”
The president then attempted to explain that “if you look at it, after a week-and-a-half… not four weeks, a week-and-a-half, two weeks,” and that “we stopped them from probably, but I don’t want to have the word ‘probably’...”
Trump, by that point in the exchange, appeared to have had enough of the questions altogether. He looked into the camera, told the gaggle, “Thank you very much,” and turned and headed for the Marine One helicopter waiting to take him back to the White House.
Reporters in the group seemed to have wrong-footed the president even before he addressed the timeline of the conflict by asking about the three U.S. soldiers killed in an exchange of strikes with the Islamist regime over the weekend—bringing the total American death toll in the conflict to 17.
The Pentagon on Monday identified two of the service members. Army Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, and Army Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, were killed in action in Jordan, the Pentagon said.
A third service member was killed in Iraq on Saturday, but their identity has not yet been released.
“We feel very badly,” Trump said of their deaths. He then quickly added: “But those people, those great patriots, are out there fighting [so] that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything, almost, militarily.”
He did not then pause to explain how his administration squares Iran having “lost everything” with the Islamist regime’s successful resumption of hostilities last week, or its ongoing resistance to talks designed to bring an end to the war he started on Feb. 28.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
