President Donald Trump reiterated on Friday Vice President JD Vance’s suggestion from the day prior that the military operation in Iran is not a war.
Vance, holding a press briefing at the White House, told reporters Thursday that he would not characterize the conflict as a war since “right now, there is no active shooting.”
The president fielded questions from reporters Friday afternoon in the Oval Office, where he agreed with Vance’s assessment.
“A lot of people don’t call it a war,” he said. “I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes. It’s not a big thing. We did Venezuela, and we did this. In Venezuela we lost nobody, and this we lost 18 people. And in Vietnam, we lost 100,000 people.”
Trump added that he would characterize the conflict as “intermittent.”
“We do intermittent strikes,” the president said. “So I heard what [Vance] said, and it was interesting because I think that there’s a lot of truth. We’re not fighting right now. There’s no fighting. I don’t think it matters what you call it. What matters is the fact that we have had tremendous success. We stopped Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) told the Washington Examiner on Thursday that the Trump administration won’t refer to the conflict as a war to avoid acknowledging “they’re in violation of the 1973 War Powers Act, which allows them only 90 days to engage before they must withdraw or get congressional approval.
“I think playing these semantics is an insult to the men and women fighting the war and to those who’ve already sacrificed,” Massie said. “Why not attempt to get the constitutionally and legally mandated congressional approval so they can call a war a war?”
You can watch Trump’s comments in full below.