‘A lot more fun’: Trump reveals general’s advice on blowing up Iran’s war ships in rambling Kentucky stump speech

President Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that top U.S. military officials preferred sinking Iranian ships to capturing them because it’s more enjoyable for them as he boasted that the U.S. has already “won” the nearly two-week-old war he started against Iran.

Speaking in Kentucky during an appearance to promote a challenger to his longtime GOP nemesis from the state, Representative Thomas Massie, Trump was boasting of the “decisive action” his administration has taken against Iran when he began recounting to supporters how the U.S. has “knocked out” alleged mine-laying boats to prevent Tehran from using mines to stop maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

“They knocked out 54 ships in two days. They’re real ships,” Trump said.

Continuing, he recalled a purported conversation with a military leader in which he became angry that the ships weren’t captured and converted for American use.

“I got angry at my people. I said, are they good … I said, Why the hell did we kill them? Why didn’t we just capture them and use them in our Navy? And actually one of my general said: ‘Sir, it’s a lot more fun doing it this way,’” he said.

The president’s comments came just hours after he boasted to Axios in a phone interview that there was “practically nothing left to target” in Iran and that the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Tehran will end soon.

“The war is going great,” he said. “We are way ahead of the timetable. We have done more damage than we thought possible, even in the original six-week period.”

Trump added that Iran had posted a threat not just to Israel but to other Gulf states across the region: “They were after the rest of the Middle East. They are paying for 47 years of death and destruction they caused. This is payback. They will not get off that easy.”

As he addressed his supporters in Kentucky, he again boasted that the U.S. had “won” the nearly week-old conflict and claimed it had been “over” in the first hour.

The knock-on effects of the conflict have caused gas prices to spike and called into question whether Trump or his party will be able to make any claim to have lowered the cost of living for Americans who will vote in November on whether to allow the GOP to keep unified control of both the House and Senate.

The administration’s explanations for why the U.S. began the conflict and the conditions under which it might end have shifted almost daily — and even hourly — over the course of the aerial campaign, and Trump has bragged that he can unilaterally bring it to a close “any time I want it to end.”

Iran’s counterattacks on both ships in the Strait of Hormuz and on U.S.-aligned oil producers have caused a squeeze in worldwide petroleum supplies that led the International Energy Agency to announce a release from many wealthy nations’ strategic reserves on Wednesday.

Trump boasted that the IEA release would be as many as 400 million barrels and claimed it would “substantially reduce the oil prices as we end this threat to America and this threat to the world.”

But he also told rally-goers that the war would continue, asking them: “We don’t want to leave early, do we?”

“We got to finish the job right,” he said.

Trump added that the U.S. has “virtually destroyed Iran” since the joint American-Israeli air campaign began on February 28 and suggested that Iran’s Air Force, air defense, and ballistic missile capabilities have been destroyed .

“Nobody has ever seen anything like it,” he said.