Lest anyone think that this achievement was of lesser consequence, Trump went out of his way to paint Baghdadi as an even bigger threat to American security than bin Laden was. Hyperbole is a classic Trumpian reflex. It’s not enough for U.S. forces to vanquish an enemy leader; it has to be the most menacing terrorist the nation has ever confronted—even though bin Laden orchestrated the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Baghdadi, Trump said, “is the biggest there is. This is the worst ever. Osama bin Laden was very big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This [Baghdadi] is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, ‘a country,’ a caliphate, and was trying to do it again.”

Graeme Wood: Baghdadi’s final humiliation

Obama’s role in finding and killing bin Laden has been on Trump’s mind for years. When fielding questions after his statement, Trump referenced a book he released the year before the 9/11 attack, The America We Deserve, that he said warned bin Laden must be killed. (This is false.)

“I don’t get any credit for this, but that’s okay. I never do,” Trump said at the news conference.

As ever, there’s a tweet from years past that’s relevant to the moment. In 2012, Trump tweeted that Obama “works hard to take all the credit away from” the Navy SEALs who killed bin Laden in a compound in Pakistan. Yesterday morning, Trump pointed to the centrality of his own contribution. Since his first day in office, “I would say, Where is al-Baghdadi? I want al-Baghdadi. We would kill terrorist leaders, but there were names I never heard of … I kept saying, Where is al-Baghdadi? And a couple of weeks ago, they were able to scope him out.”

The White House declined to comment about Trump’s messaging tactics.

News of the successful raid comes at an auspicious moment for Trump. Impeachment hearings are producing a trove of revelations that Trump and his underlings pressured Ukraine into digging up political dirt on his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. With Baghdadi’s death, Trump can try to shift the conversation and showcase his credentials as commander in chief. He can recount this story on the campaign trail for the next 12 months, delighting his base with details that he learned—and can declassify at will—while watching the operation unfold in real time.

Read: Trump has no room for error in 2020

Trump returned to the White House around 4:20 p.m. ET Saturday after playing golf at his private club in Northern Virginia with two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and David Perdue, and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. Then, at about 5 p.m., Trump said he went down to the Situation Room to watch the raid along with Vice President Mike Pence; General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Defense Secretary Mark Esper; and others.