Donald Trump refused to take the use of nuclear weapons off the table in any situation, including in Europe or the Middle East, during a wide-ranging town hall on Wednesday on MSNBC.
The GOP presidential front-runner said he would consider using a nuclear weapon if the U.S. were attacked by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, according to an MSNBC transcript of the interview released Wednesday afternoon.
{mosads}”Somebody hits us within ISIS, you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” he said.
When host Chris Matthews asked if the real estate mogul could definitively say he wouldn’t use nuclear weapons, he responded: “I would never say that. I would never take any of my cards off the table.”
Matthews pressed him, asking if he would consider using nuclear weapons in Europe.
“No, I don’t think so,” Trump said, but he again said he wouldn’t definitively write off the option.
In a New York Times interview published over the weekend, Trump stressed the importance of unpredictability in his foreign policy. He told Matthews Wednesday that “you’d be a bad negotiator” for taking any strategy off the table.
He called nuclear weapons “sort of like the end of the ball game.”
“I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table,” he said.
The interview is set to air on MSNBC at 8 p.m. Wednesday.