Tuesday at a news conference with Baltic Leaders, President Donald Trump said he wanted to get American troops out of Syria.

Trump said, “As far as Syria is concerned, our primary mission in terms of that was getting rid of ISIS. We’ve almost completed that task. And we’ll be making a decision very quickly in coordination with others in the area as to what we’ll do. Saudi Arabia is very interested in our decision. And I said, well, you know, you want us to stay, maybe you’ll have to pay. But we do a lot of things in this country. We do them for—we do them for a lot of reasons. But it is very costly for our country. And it helps other countries a hell of a lot more than it helps us. So we’re going to be making a decision. We’ve had a tremendous military success against ISIS as you know. It is close to 100% as I just said. And we’ll be making a decision as to what we do in the very near future. We’ll be consulting also with the groups of our people and groups of our allies.”

When asked, “Are you inclined to pull the troops out?” Trump continued, “I want to get out. I want to bring our troops back home. I want to start rebuilding our nation. We will have, as of three months ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East the last seven years. We get nothing out of it, nothing. And as you remember, in civilian life, for years I said keep the oil. I was always saying keep the oil. We didn’t keep the oil. Who got the oil? It was ISIS got the oil. A lot of it. That’s what funded their campaigns. They took a lot of the oil, and it was largely responsible for funding. We should have kept the oil then. We didn’t keep the oil. So I want to get back and rebuild our nation. Think of it. Seven trillion dollars over 17 year period, we have nothing — nothing except death and destruction. It’s a horrible thing. So it is time. It is time. We were very successful against ISIS. We’ll be successful against anybody militarily. But sometimes it is time to come back home. And we’re thinking about that very seriously.”

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