President Donald Trump swore live on air during a high-stakes meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House.
Trump was taking questions from reporters and was asked about the conflict with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro when he dropped the expletive.
“He [Maduro] has offered everything,” Trump said. “You know why? Because he doesn’t want to f*** around with the United States.”
After using the swear word, Trump swiftly brought the press conference to a close.
Broadcasters apologized to viewers for the president’s language.
In June, Trump lashed with the same language after a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran he announced earlier appeared to break down.
“We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f*** they’re doing,” a frustrated Trump told reporters at the White House as he departed for a NATO summit in the Netherlands.
The Trump administration escalated the U.S. military campaign against Maduro’s regime this week after the president authorized the CIA to covertly operate inside Venezuela.
Trump claimed Wednesday that he “authorized” CIA operations because Venezuela “emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and flooded the country with drugs.
Last month, the administration declared the United States is formally engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels that the president has labeled “unlawful combatants,” according to a confidential notice to members of Congress.
The notice appears to invoke extraordinary wartime powers to justify a series of missile strikes targeting boats off the coast of Venezuela and in the Caribbean that have killed at least 27 people in recent weeks.
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