In May 2025, Trump said of the conflict between India and Pakistan: “Why don’t you let them fight? Why are we getting in the middle of it? I said let them fight.”
While the clip is authentic, it is from 2019. Trump was referencing the U.S. and India intervening in a conflict between ISIS and the Taliban in Afghanistan, not the current conflict between India and Pakistan.
In the wake of escalating tensions between India and Pakistan in early May 2025, a video clip spread widely online that multiple users across X (archived, archived, archived, archived) — and at least one user on both Bluesky (archived) and YouTube — claimed it showed U.S. President Donald Trump saying, “Why don’t you let them fight? Why are we getting in the middle of it? I said let them fight,” in reference to India and Pakistan.
For example, one X user captioned the video: “TRUMP on India and Pakistan fighting each other!”
Collectively, these posts had received more than 2.1 million views as of this writing.
While the clip is authentic, it is not from or related to the India-Pakistan clashes in 2025. Instead, it stemmed from a Jan. 2, 2019, news conference during Trump’s first Cabinet meeting of that year (beginning at minute 11:37). The president was arguing against India and the U.S. intervening in a conflict between ISIS and the Taliban in Afghanistan, not India and Pakistan. Therefore, the above social media posts miscaptioned the footage.
He argued that India should not be involved in Afghanistan and used examples of the U.S.’s involvement in the country to illustrate why he believed intervention was a futile endeavor.
After a reporter off camera asked Trump about India’s role in Afghanistan, Trump answered:
Well I don’t think India should be involved in Afghanistan. I mean, I’ll give you an example. You can talk about our generals; I gave our generals all the money they wanted, they didn’t do such a great job in Afghanistan. They’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for 19 years.
Continuing his remarks (at minute 13:02, the transcript of which is available here), Trump made the comments (highlighted in bold) that featured in the social media posts circulating in May 2025:
We’re going to do something that’s right. We are talking to the Taliban. We’re talking to a lot of different people. But here’s the thing, because you mentioned India. India’s there. Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan, Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there, they should be fighting. But Russia should be fighting. The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight. And literally, they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again as opposed to the Soviet Union, you know, a lot of these places you’re reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan. But why isn’t Russia there, why isn’t India there, why isn’t Pakistan there, why are we there when we’re 6,000 miles away? But I don’t mind, we want to help our people, we want to help other nations. You do have terrorists, mostly Taliban, but ISIS. I mean I’ll give you an example. So Taliban is our enemy. ISIS is our enemy. We have an area that I brought up with our generals four or five weeks ago where Taliban is here, ISIS is here, and they’re fighting each other. I said why don’t you let them fight? Why are we getting in the middle of it? I said let them fight. They’re both our enemies. Let them fight. “Sir, we want to do it —” they go in and they end up fighting both of them. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I think I would’ve been a good general, but who knows.
As the above passage shows, Trump was asserting that India and the U.S. should not be intervening in Afghanistan in 2019. Social media users who shared the quote in bold without this context intentionally or unintentionally misinterpreted the clip and applied it to current relations, as of 2025, between India, Pakistan and the U.S.
In reality, on May 6, 2025, Trump responded to the conflict between the two countries, saying: “It’s a shame … I just hope it ends very quickly.”
In sum, the circulated video was unrelated to the current tension between Pakistan and India. Rather, the clip was from a 2019 news conference in which Trump argued that India should not be involved in Afghanistan and used examples of what he believed were fruitless efforts to accomplish U.S. goals after 19 years in the region. The circulated clips were misrepresentative and misleading.