‘Who knows better about surprise than Japan?’ Trump’s Pearl Harbor comment to Japan’s PM stuns room

U.S. President Trump made a Pearl Harbor comment in front of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and the room fell silent afterwards.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday drew ‌a parallel between U.S. strikes on ‌Iran and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor decades ago, as he defended the war against Tehran at a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington.

“We wanted surprise. Who ​knows better ​about surprise than Japan? ‌Why didn’t you tell ⁠me about Pearl Harbor?" Trump said when a journalist asked why he had not told allies about his war plans.

“You believe in surprise, I ⁠think much more so than us.”

Takaichi’s eyes widened and she shifted in her chair as Trump, seated beside ⁠her in the Oval Office, evoked the moment that drew the U.S. into World War Two.

The Japanese attack on the ​U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on ‌Dec. 7, 1941, ⁠killed 2,390 ⁠Americans, and the U.S. declared war on Japan the next day.

U.S. President Franklin ⁠D. Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.”

The U.S. defeated Japan in ‌August 1945, days after U.S. atomic bomb attacks ⁠on Hiroshima and ‌Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and ‌Bhargav Acharya; Writing ‌by Daphne Psaledakis; editing by ​Scott Malone and Chizu Nomiyama)