During an interview with The Associated Press, President Donald Trump said that the responsibilities of being president were “massive” and that the decision to launch missiles into Syria was one that weighed on him heavily.
“I never realized how big it was,” Trump said in an interview that was published on Sunday after being conducted on Friday. “Everything’s so… like, you know the orders are so massive.”
“Number one, there’s great responsibility,” he added. “When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, ‘You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that’s involved,’ because people could have been killed.
“This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area… and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet,” Trump continued. “Every decision is much harder than you’d normally make.”
He added that the human factor played a greater role in governing than in business: “Pretty much everything you do in government involves heart, whereas in business, most things don’t involve heart. In fact, in business you’re actually better off without it.”
“The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency,” he went on to say. “This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world.”
During this same interview, President Trump claimed he did not know what WikiLeaks was, despite praising the information-leaking organization throughout his presidential campaign. Trump also said that the Electoral College was “very difficult for a Republican to win” because it’s “so skewed” towards Democrats, though data suggests the Electoral College map actually seems to favor Republicans.