The president spoke to military leadership in Quantico, Virginia, on Tuesday morning. On his way out of the White House, he danced around a question from the Washington Examiner about plans for strikes against the gangs on Venezuelan soil.

“We’ll see what happens with Venezuela. Venezuela has been very dangerous with drugs and with other things, and they’ve been very, very dangerous,” he stated, before pointing back to the strikes on drug boats.

“We had a lot of drugs coming in through water. We call it water drugs, just a simple term. We don’t have any boats on the water. There are no boats. There are no fishing boats. There are no anything. So we hit a number of boats. You probably saw that, and since we did that, we have absolutely no drugs coming into our country via water, because it was lethal,” Trump continued. “And now we’ll look at cartels. We’re going to look very seriously at cartels coming by land.”

The president declined to say if he planned to discuss the subject during his speech in Quantico, describing the event as “only an esprit de corps.”

CONGRESSIONAL LEADERS LEAVE WHITE HOUSE WITH NO DEAL TO AVERT SHUTDOWN: ‘STILL LARGE DIFFERENCES’

“A thing like this has never been done before, because they came from all over the world,” he explained. “And there’s a little bit of expense, not much, but there’s a little expense to that. We don’t like to waste it. We’d rather spend it on bullets and rockets, frankly. But this was the one time we had to do a great spiritizing.”

Still, the president did say that he planned to meet with “generals and with admirals and with leaders,” and that if he didn’t “like somebody, [he’s] going to fire them right on the spot.”