Former President Donald Trump spent the weekend joking with top GOP donors about Russia’s war on Ukraine as the Ukrainian people continued to fight for their lives. Trump’s latest response to Vladimir Putin’s ongoing assault was to apparently spitball ways the United States might provoke a different national security crisis, an idea he put forward during an 84-minute speech to Republican National Committee donors in New Orleans on Saturday. The U.S. should “put the Chinese flag” on its military planes and “bomb the shit” out of Russia, Trump reportedly told the crowd. “And then we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch.” The proposal drew laughs from the room at the Four Seasons hotel, where some of the party’s top beneficiaries were gathered for a retreat, according to the Washington Post. 

As you may recall, Trump appeared to be impressed by the Russian president’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last month, praising Putin’s military moves as “savvy” and “brilliant.” The response was largely out of step with the rest of his party—Washington for the most part struck a bipartisan note on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—and the former president appeared to take note, taking a slightly harder stance against Russia’s war in subsequent remarks. On Saturday, Trump claimed that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine if he was still in office and proclaimed that “nobody has ever been tougher on Russia than me.” The comments seemed to be a response to former Vice President Mike Pence, who in a speech a night earlier, took indirect aim at Trump’s pro-Putin stance: “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin,” Pence told donors.

Trump on Saturday may have been trying to rewrite recent history with vague assertions about how things would have been different under his watch—and publicly backing away from his glowing praise for Putin. But the former president nonetheless reinforced his affection for authoritarian leaders by spotlighting a different one: North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. The dictator is “seriously tough,” Trump said in his speech, envying the way aides and generals “cowered” under Kim’s leadership and the “total control” he had over his staff. “I looked at my people and said I want my people to act like that,” he told the crowd.