Donald Trump left critics in disbelief on Sunday with a remark about his Iran war during a press gaggle aboard Air Force One.
The president was discussing his call for other countries to send ships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, the vital — and currently effectively shut — waterway off Iran through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes.
Asked how quickly those deployments would happen, Trump said it would “start immediately,” with different countries offering different forms of assistance, including minesweeper boats.
He later said: “So, we need, I, I would really, I’m demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory because it is their territory, it’s the place from which they get their energy and they should come and they should help us protect it.”
Then came the line that quickly sparked reaction online:
“You could make the case that maybe we shouldn’t even be there at all because we don’t need it.”
“We have a lot of oil,” said Trump. “We were the number one producer anywhere in the world times two by double, at least double. Now I think it’s much higher than that. But we do it. It’s almost like we do it for habit, but we also do it for some very good allies that we have in the Middle East.”
