— U.S. President Donald Trump, in a tense exchange with reporters, on the scope of the conflict with Iran:

Reporter: “This no longer seems like a small matter. 18 American military personnel have been killed. We’re seeing unprecedented and prolonged deployments of forces. You said at first that this operation would continue only until last week.”

Trump: “Why do you say the deployments are unprecedented and long? How long were we in Vietnam? How long were we in Vietnam? No, no, how long were we in Vietnam? We’ve been dealing with this for five months now.

And you know what we did during these five months? They won’t have nuclear weapons anymore. That’s what we did. Iran won’t have nuclear weapons. Because if they had nuclear weapons, you probably wouldn’t be able to stand here for very long.

Iran won’t have nuclear weapons. We have prevented them from getting it.

We might target the ‘pickaxe’ very soon, because if something related to the pickaxe was going on…”