President Trump received a restrained reaction Tuesday when he made an offhand joke about military readiness while addressing hundreds of senior leaders at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.
Speaking about the nuclear submarines he ordered closer to Russia in August, President Trump said he prefers not to talk much about nuclear weapons out of superstition.
“We can’t let people throw it around, that word,” he said. “I call it the N-word.”
“There are two N-words, and you can’t use either of them,” he added with a grin.
He quickly shifted to boasting about U.S. nuclear capabilities. “Frankly, if it does get to use, we have more than anybody else,” he said. “We have better, we have newer, but it’s something you don’t ever want to have to think about.”
Most of the room remained silent during his remarks. “I never walked into a room so silent before,” President Trump observed. “If you want to applaud, you applaud. You can do anything you want.” He later warned, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. But, there goes your rank and there goes your future,” a line that prompted nervous laughter from parts of the audience.
Earlier the same morning, before boarding Marine One, President Trump told reporters he planned to be blunt with military leadership. “I’m going to be meeting with generals and admirals and with leaders,” he said. “And if I don’t like somebody, I’m gonna fire them right on the spot.”
During the address he also reiterated claims about his diplomatic achievements, referencing a recently announced plan for the Gaza Strip and predicting it could add to his list of resolved conflicts. “If this [Gaza] works out, we’ll have eight [wars resolved] — eight in eight months. That’s pretty good. Nobody’s ever done that,” he said.
When asked whether such efforts would win him the Nobel Peace Prize, President Trump dismissed the idea. “Will you get the Nobel Prize? Absolutely not,” he said. “They’ll give it to some guy that didn’t do a damn thing. They’ll give it to a guy that wrote a book about the mind of Donald Trump. We’ll see what happens, but it would be a big insult to our country. I will tell you that. I don’t want it. I want the country to get it.”
