Trump undermines himself three times in one press conference - and makes outlandish war claim

In developments which aren’t exactly news at this point, US president Donald Trump contradicted himself multiple times during a press conference in the White House on Thursday, while talking about issues such as the war in Ukraine and federal indictments.

We’ve rounded them all up below, for your reading (dis)pleasure…

No other president has ‘ended a war’…

In his latest comments boasting about his efforts to bring about peace, Trump claimed he does not think “any president has ever ended a war”.

He continued: “Did Bush ever, do you think Biden ended a war? Biden started wars, because he was stupid,

“Do you think Biden ended any wars? No.

“I don’t know of anybody that ended wars. I ended eight of them. I ended nine. I think we’re going to have this one [the Russia-Ukraine war] done, probably, soon.”

Except it was Joe Biden who ended the war in Afghanistan.

Also, Abraham Lincoln oversaw the end of the Civil War in 1865; Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize - yes, the very same award Trump’s been talking about for ages - for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War in the early 1900s; Harry Truman helped bring about an end to the Second World War with the Potsdam Declaration and the dropping of atomic bombs in Japan; and Barack Obama announced the end of the Iraq War in 2011.

We can’t quite believe we’ve had to explain US history to one of its presidents, but there you go…

From ‘we have a lot of Tomahawks’ to ‘we need them'

On Tuesday, Trump boasted about the US military capabilities when he said America has “a lot of Tomahawks” – which are long-range missiles:

But on Thursday, he shifted his stance quite a bit, telling reporters: “We need Tomahawks for the United States of America, too. We have a lot of them, but we need them.

“You can’t deplete for our country. So they’re very vital, very accurate and very good, but we need them too, so I don’t know what we can do about that.”

Oh dear…

The indictment of John Bolton

And when a reporter asked him for his reaction to the news that his former adviser John Bolton had been indicted by a federal jury, Trump replied: “I didn’t know that, you’re telling me for the first time, but I think he’s a bad person. I think he’s a… bad guy, yeah.

“He’s a bad guy. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it goes.”

Except it’s his Justice Department which is prosecuting the case against his former confidant (now a critic), and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, who announced the indictment that day.

Awkward.

Why not read…

• Trump hosts $1m ticket fundraiser for gold ballroom
• RFK Jr’s offered up another 'poppycock' science claim

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