Just over 83 years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt called the Imperial Japanese Navy’s December 7. 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor “a date that will live in infamy” as he urged Congress to declare war.
On Thursday, President Donald Trump turned it into a punchline.
Trump was finishing up a question-and-answer session with reporters during a bilateral meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi when a Japanese journalist asked why he did not inform key American allies — such as Japan — before the start of the joint U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran on February 28.
The president initially replied that the U.S. “went in very hard” and “didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise.”
But Trump’s response took an awkward turn moments later when he said: “Who knows better about surprise than Japan?”
After some muted laughter from the U.S. officials who’d joined him for the meeting, he turned to Sanae — who was born two decades after the attack — to ask her another question.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, OK?”
At that point, laughter turned to audible groans. The room went silent.
Takaichi, who spent two years in Washington working on Capitol Hill during the Reagan administration and has a strong command of English, was clearly taken a back by the president’s attempt at humor.
The smile she’d had on her face disappeared and her eyes widened as she realized what Trump had just said.
After an awkward pause, Trump returned to the topic he’d been asked about, telling reporters, “He’s asking me about surprise, and we did.”
“And because of that surprise, we knocked out ... we probably knocked out 50 percent ... and much more than we anticipated doing. So if I go and tell everybody about it, there's no longer a surprise,” he said.
The surprise Pearl Harbor airstrike against the U.S. Pacific Fleet on Dec. 7, 1941 left more than 2,400 American service members dead and nearly 1,200 injured from bombs and shells that sunk four American battleships and left four more severely damaged. It was the deadliest attack on American soil until the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Seven of those ships were salvaged and returned to service, while the seventh — the U.S.S. Arizona — was left where it had settled just below the harbor’s surface after a Japanese bomb detonated inside a explosive powder magazine.
The attack took place after months of failed negotiations between Tokyo and Washington over economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., the U.K., China and The Netherlands in an attempt to deny Japan’s military the raw materials it needed to prosecute wars in China and what is now Vietnam.
Japan declared war on the U.S. on the day of the strikes, but the official declaration did not arrive in Washington until afterwards.
The Pearl Harbor attack gave Roosevelt the leverage he needed to push for the U.S. to formally enter World War II — allowing him to join ally Great Britain in fighting Adolf Hitler’s march through Europe — with the House and Senate approving declarations of war against Japan by margins of 388-1 and 82-0, respectively.
Less than four years later, Japan would accept America’s demand for “unconditional surrender” after the U.S. dropped the first two — and thus far the only two — nuclear weapons to be used in combat in separate strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese government has never formally apologized for the infamous sneak attack, though one of Takaichi’s predecessors — the late Shinzo Abe — delivered a speech expressing "sincere and everlasting condolences" to the American and Japanese personnel killed in the fighting that day during a 2016 visit to the Pearl Harbor memorial above the wreck of Arizona.
Abe, who was assassinated in July 2022, said at the time that the U.S. and Japan “must never repeat the horrors of war again.”
Japanese PM says she and Trump are ‘best buddies’ in remarks after Pearl Harbor joke
Japan's Takaichi tries to reaffirm alliance with Trump as he seeks help securing Strait of Hormuz
Treasury Department taking over some student loans as the Education Department gets dismantled
Trump administration putting millions into minerals company backed by Donald Trump Jr
FBI agents allege they were fired for working on Trump 2020 election investigation
Staffer changed HHS voicemail to Domino’s message to thwart animal rights protesters
