A reporter was able to distract Donald Trump even as the president was in the middle of a “very important” meeting about the war in Iran.
PBS NewsHour White House correspondent Liz Landers posted on X that she had a brief phone call with Trump on Monday morning about the conflict in the Middle East, even though the president was participating in official discussions on the matter.
“He noted when he answered that it was not a good time to chat because he was in the middle of a ‘very important meeting’ about it,” Landers posted on X.
Landers then relayed her conversation with Trump about the war in a series of X posts. This included a potentially key update from Trump about Kharg Island, Iran’s economic lifeline that handles nearly all of the country’s crude exports, which the U.S. attacked last week.
“Kharg Island is out of commission except for the pipes, which I left. I didn’t want to hit the pipes because, you know, it’s years of work to put them together,” Trump told Landers.
The president added that he would “strike it again,” in reference to the tiny oil terminal just off the coast of Iran.
“I told them openly, I’ll knock the hell out of it,’” Landers quoted Trump as saying. “He noted he purposefully left ‘100 yards’ around ‘anything having to do with oil’ there. ‘Didn’t even come close,’ adding it takes a lot to rebuild infrastructure.
“He continued, ‘I left a lot of infrastructure in Tehran because if you did it, it’s years of building...I could knock out the electric plants in one hour... but if I do that, that’s years of rebuilding and it’s trauma. So I’m trying to hold off on that kind of thing,’” Landers posted.
During the call, Trump also claimed that oil prices will “drop like a rock” as soon as the war ends. “I don’t believe it will be long,” he added.
Details of the call arrived after the White House expressed concerns about how willing Trump is to pick up the phone and talk to reporters about the Iran war.
One anonymous administration official told The Atlantic that the dozens of calls Trump has taken part in were getting “out of control.”
In the days after launching his war in Iran, Trump took phone calls from ABC, CNN, Fox News, MS NOW, the New York Times, Washington Post, Axios, the Atlantic, New York Post and Daily Mail.
Elsewhere, a White House source told Semafor that Trump does not bother taking the barrage of calls seeking updates on the unpopular war in Iran very seriously.
The source said that when Trump takes the calls, he is “often preoccupied, puts them on speaker in front of a large group of people, and he is loosely chatting and has fun messing with them.
“Reporters who think they are being serious journalists by calling him are frankly doing themselves a disservice,” the source added.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told the Daily Beast that Trump’s willingness to talk on the phone is proof the president is the “most transparent and accessible president in history.”
“The press can’t get enough of Trump, and they know it,” Leavitt added.
