In a 30+ minute phone interview on CNBC's Squawk Box on April 21, 2026, Trump pulled out a “little chart” comparing war durations and declared: “I would have won Vietnam, very quickly. I would have won Iraq in the same amount of time that we've won here.”
Trump dodged the Vietnam draft five times: four educational deferments and one medical deferment for bone spurs in 1968. The bone spurs diagnosis has been discredited by the family of the doctor who made it. Trump once told Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases was “my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
In the same interview, Trump said “I'm five months” into the Iran war — it was actually in its seventh week. He called critics “treasonous” and said of the 13 dead U.S. soldiers: “We lost 13 men, and that's terrible... but if somebody would have said we've done this and obliterated that country... people would have said that's not possible.”
He also called a ceasefire extension “highly unlikely” and said he had “all the time in the world” — while gas sits above $4, the strait is contested, and Iran refuses to negotiate.