President Donald Trump made a startling statement Friday afternoon while boasting about how he believes he handled his widely-condemned withdrawal of U.S. troops from Northern Syria – a move that had opened the gate to ethnic cleansing of America’s now-former allies, the Kurds.
“We’ve taken control of the oil in the Middle East, the oil that we’re talking about, the oil that everybody was worried about. We have the U.S. control of that,” Trump said, minutes after concluding a talk with the first two women astronauts to participate in an all-women spacewalk.
Trump went on to claim “there are no shots being fired, and a lot of people are doing a lot of things,” despite the supposed “ceasefire” that lasted less than 24 hours.
“This is a deal that should been made 15 years, 10 ago, over the last number of years under the Obama administration. The real numbers is over one million people were killed,” Trump said, doubling his claim from earlier this week. “We have lost no, not a drop of blood since we’ve started, what I’ve started, and it was, so far it’s working out.”
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale was among the first to report on Trump’s stunning claim.
Trump in fact made a similar statement on Twitter that went largely unnoticed just a few hours ago:
Reporters are expressing confusion over what the president meant: