President Donald Trump admitted that he was motivated to end his war in Iran to prevent a global depression, and CNN's John Berman was flabbergasted by one particular aspect of those remarks.
The president signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran to wind down the war he launched Feb. 28, which disrupted global trade, rattled markets and sent fuel costs soaring, and he told reporters that he feared being saddled with a depression.
"So rather than possibly going into a depression, rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover, he was always the one I didn't want to be," Trump said, referring to the 31st president whose policies are often blamed for leading to the Great Depression. "I didn't want to see economic catastrophe."
CNN's David Goldman reported on the 80-year-old president's remarks.
"Herbert Hoover, that's not a comparison that you want to be making," Goldman said. "It's kind of an interesting acknowledgment, right, that the economic power that Iran had was really weighing on not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy, and when he's talking about economic catastrophe, I mean, that might be hyperbole, but it also shows that getting into a war like this, you never know what's going to happen."
Immediately upon signing the agreement at the Palace of Versailles in France, Trump said – accompanied by up-down hand gestures – that he hoped fuel costs would go down and the stock market would go up, and Berman reacted with surprise to Trump's statements on his desire to end the conflict.
"It's absolutely an admissionof the leverage that Iran had," Berman said. "It was stunning to hear him saythat quite so explicitly."