President Donald said Wednesday that Americans lack the patience for the United States to seize Iran’s oil.
“We could just take their oil,” Trump said at an event at the White House earlier, according to a video shared online. “But, you know, I’m not sure that the people in our country have the patience to do that, which is unfortunate, you know, they want to see it end.”
Trump seemed to acknowledge he’s facing some political pressure to end the war.
“If we stayed there, I, you know, I prefer just to take the oil. We could do it so easily. I would prefer that, but people in the country, sort of, say, ‘Just win. You’re winning so big, just win, come home.’ And I’m okay with that too because we have a lot of oil,” Trump added.
His comments come as new CNN polling shows just one-third of the public believes he has a clear plan to handle the situation in Iran. Notably, Americans aren’t sold on the war’s costs, and many more Americans say the economy, rather than the war, is the most important issue facing the US.
But Trump on Wednesday painted the federal government’s role as “military protection,” rather than helping provide things like daycare, Medicaid or Medicare.
“It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things. They can do it on a state basis. You can’t do it on a federal. We have to take care of one thing: military protection. We have to guard the country.”
The video of Trump’s remarks was posted by a Business Insider reporter, who said the White House had uploaded it to its YouTube page. But the video was no longer visible on the page as of early Wednesday evening. CNN reached out to the White House.