SPIKING THE FOOTBALL: In his interview with the Associated Press Tuesday, President Trump was unabashed in declaring victory — and taking full credit for — vanquishing ISIS. “We’ve done an excellent job. We’ve defeated ISIS. ISIS is defeated in all of the areas that we fought ISIS,” he said, according to a transcript released by AP yesterday. “And that would have never happened under President Obama. In fact, it [was] going the other way.”

The president’s unqualified assessment came on the same day all his top advisers were urging caution about premature pronouncements of success. Brett McGurk, the president’s special envoy to the Defeat-ISIS coalition, made a point of staying the successful strategy that has reduced ISIS fighters to a small pocket of resistance in Syria began under Obama, and accelerated under Trump. “We’ve made a lot of progress in the last four years, made an awful lot of progress in the last two years, in particular,” McGurk told reporters at a roundtable Tuesday. “It’s not over.”