"And as he said last night, in addition to those comments, you'll have to wait and see," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Friday of the president's remarks. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images White House won't clarify what Trump meant by 'the calm before the storm'

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined Friday to offer any clarity into what President Donald Trump meant a day earlier when he cryptically remarked at a meeting with military officials that the gathering could be “the calm before the storm.”

“As we've said many times before, I know the president has, as I have from this podium on quite a few occasions, we’re never going to say in advance what the president’s going to do,” Sanders said Friday in response to a question about the president’s remarks. “And as he said last night, in addition to those comments, you'll have to wait and see.”


Trump made his comment Thursday evening flanked by uniformed military officials at a moment of particular international stress. North Korea has ramped up its nuclear program in recent months, test-firing ballistic missiles over Japan and detonating its most powerful nuclear device to date. The president has pointedly refused to take a military option off the table in his pledge to keep North Korea from obtaining a nuclear missile capable of striking the continental U.S.

Tensions elsewhere around the world have ramped up as well, with Trump committing U.S. troops to Afghanistan and U.S. military advisers still aiding Iraqi forces in their campaign against the Islamic State. Relations between the U.S. and Iran appear to have becoming increasingly strained as well, with Trump weighing whether or not to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Both North Korea and Iran, Sanders said, “continue to be bad actors.”

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“He certainly doesn't want to lay out his game plan for our enemies, so if you're asking, ‘Is the president trying to, you know, do that?’ Absolutely,” she said. “I don't think that that's a secret. I wouldn't say necessarily that he's trying to throw people off, but he’s not trying to broadcast or telegraph his exact actions. I think we've seen what a failure it is when an administration does that, and this is a president who's going to do it differently and do it better.”

