Trump said he fully supported Crozier's removal, though he said, "I didn't make the decision."

"The letter was a five-page letter from a captain, and the letter was all over the place," Trump said. "That's not appropriate."

“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter. I mean, this isn't a class on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that's nuclear powered. And he shouldn't be talking that way in a letter,” Trump said.

The president also criticized Crozier for making a port call in Da Nang, Vietnam, in the midst of a global outbreak.

"Perhaps you don't do that in the middle of a pandemic," Trump said. "History would say you don't necessarily stop and let your sailors get off."

Defense officials have defended the Roosevelt's port call as reasonable decision to have made back in early February.

"At that time there were only 16 positive cases in Vietnam, and those were well to the north all isolated in Hanoi," Adm. Michael Gilday, the chief of naval operations, said in a March 24 press briefing, calling it "a very risk-informed decision" made by Admiral Philip Davidson, the head of Indo-Pacific Command.