AP Photo/Wade Payne
Donald Trump.
"You've got to get points for vision when you're running for office," the businessman said about midway through an hour-long speech in Knoxville, Tennessee.
"I want to make our military so strong, so powerful, so incredible, we'll never have to use it!" he added. "Nobody is going to mess with us!"
Trump soon pointed a comment he made during a campaign rally last week, in which he vowed to "bomb the s---" out of the oil fields that offer a prime source of funding for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
"It's going to be stopped. Somebody criticized me the other day because they asked me what I'd do. And I said, 'I'm going to bomb the s--- out of them,'" Trump recalled Monday as his supporters roared in approval.
"It's true," the candidate mused. "I don't care. I don't care. They've got to be stopped."