President Trump has reportedly suggested on multiple occasions to Homeland Security and to national security officials that they consider nuking hurricanes to prevent them from hitting the United States, Axios reported Sunday.

According to a source present at a hurricane briefing at the White House, the president at one point said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?"

He reportedly continued, "They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they're moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can't we do that?"

"You could hear a gnat fart in that meeting," the source said. "People were astonished. After the meeting ended, we thought, 'What the f---? What do we do with this?'"

An official told the president at the time, "Sir, we'll look into that."

The president then apparently raised the idea in another conversation with officials, but his "bomb the hurricanes" idea never never entered a formal policy process.

In response to the report, a senior White House official said, "We don't comment on private discussions that the president may or may not have had with his national security team."

However, another senior official defended Trump's idea, saying, "His goal — to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland — is not bad. His objective is not bad."

"What people near the president do is they say, 'I love a president who asks questions like that, who’s willing to ask tough questions,'" the official continued. "It takes strong people to respond to him in the right way when stuff like this comes up. For me, alarm bells weren't going off when I heard about it, but I did think somebody is going to use this to feed into 'the president is crazy' narrative."

The idea to bomb hurricanes dates back to the Eisenhower presidency when it was first floated by a government scientist. Scientists have since agreed it won't work.

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UPDATE: President Trump calls the Axios report "FAKE NEWS!" Axios' Jonathan Swan says he stands by his reporting.

