President Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping about the missile strike on Syria over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake” during his Mar-a-Lago visit last week.
Trump told Fox Business that he and Xi were eating dessert when he got the news that the strike was about to occur.
“I was sitting at the table. We had finished dinner. We’re now having dessert. And we had the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen and President Xi was enjoying it,” Trump said. “And I was given the message from the generals that the ships are locked and loaded, what do you do? And we made a determination to do it, so the missiles were on the way.”
“And I said, ‘Mr. President, let me explain something to you.’ This was during dessert. We’ve just fired 59 missiles, all of which hit, by the way, unbelievable, from, you know, hundreds of miles away, all of which hit, amazing.”
Trump said Xi was silent upon hearing the news but appeared to have a positive response to the strike.
.@POTUS tells @MariaBartiromo he told President Xi about the Missile strikes over "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake." pic.twitter.com/vPLu7ZhxbR— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) April 12, 2017
“We’re almost finished and I — what does he do, finish his dessert and go home and then they say, you know, the guy you just had dinner with just attacked a country?” Trump said.
He added, “He paused for 10 seconds and then he asked the interpreter to please say it again. I didn’t think that was a good sign. And he said to me, anybody that uses gases — you could almost say or anything else — but anybody that was so brutal and uses gases to do that young children and babies, it’s OK.”
The Pentagon on Tuesday clarified that 57 of the 59 cruise missiles hit their targets at the Shayrat airfield in Syria. Trump also cited the “genius” of military equipment and the need to increase funding.
“It’s so incredible. It’s brilliant. It’s genius. Our technology, our equipment, is better than anybody by a factor of five,” Trump said. “I mean look, we have, in terms of technology, nobody can even come close to competing.
“Now we’re going to start getting it, because, you know, the military has been cut back and depleted so badly by the past administration and by the war in Iraq, which was another disaster,” he said.
