President Donald Trump on Friday said that he hadn’t given the final order to commence with military strikes against Iran the night before, and said no planes were in the air.
In a one-on-one interview for “Meet the Press,” NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Trump if planes were in the air Thursday night after reports emerged that Trump had approved, and then called off, military strikes against Iran in retaliation for the shooting of an American drone earlier this week.
“No,” Trump responded, “but they would have been pretty soon, and things would have happened to a point where you would not turn back, you could not turn back.”
He added, “Nothing was green lighted until the very end because things change.”
Trump tweeted earlier on Friday that “we were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night,” but stopped when told that the strike would kill approximately 150 people.
“I thought about it for a second and I said, you know what, they shot down an unmanned drone, plane, whatever you want to call it, and here we are sitting with a 150 dead people that would have taken place probably within a half an hour after I said go ahead," Trump said in the interview, which will air in full on Sunday. "And I didn’t like it, I didn’t think, I didn’t think it was proportionate."
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