Trump claims he wanted to kill Assad, contradicting earlier denials.

President Trump claimed on Tuesday that he wanted to assassinate President Bashar al-Assad of Syria early in his presidency, at the height of that country’s bloody civil war, but James N. Mattis, then the secretary of defense, stopped him.

“I would’ve rather taken him out. I had him all set,” Mr. Trump said during a morning appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general.”

That assertion contradicts Mr. Trump’s own previous denials that he ever considered going after the Syrian strongman, whose regime has killed scores of thousands of civilians.

In 2018, Bob Woodward reported in his book “Fear” that Mr. Trump told Mr. Mattis the military should kill Assad. But Mr. Trump called that account “fiction” after the book came out. “That was never even contemplated, nor would it be contemplated and it should not have been written about in the book,” he said.