At a Nov. 1 rally in Dubuque, Iowa, President Donald Trump said a week would have been enough to win the Vietnam War and named the city now called Ho Chi Minh City—then Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam—as a target.
“I would have won that war in one week,” Trump said in remarks recorded by C-SPAN. He criticized the U.S. military’s use of herbicides and said it should have targeted the city instead of spraying forests, according to the rally transcript.
During the war, Ho Chi Minh City was known as Saigon and was the capital of South Vietnam, which was backed by the United States. Hanoi was North Vietnam’s capital, and Ho Chi Minh led the northern government, according to a U.S. Army history. After reunification, Vietnam’s government renamed Saigon as Ho Chi Minh City in 1976, the Library of Congress says.
That history places the city Trump named in the South. The transcript records him identifying it as a target but does not show him saying it was in North Vietnam.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs says the military sprayed Agent Orange from 1962 to 1971. The blend of tactical herbicides was used to clear trees and dense tropical growth that could provide cover for enemy forces. The VA says the name came from an orange stripe painted on storage drums.
U.S. troops left under an agreement reached in 1973, the VA says, but fighting continued until North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon in 1975. The Defense Department’s casualty database lists 58,220 U.S. military deaths in the Vietnam conflict’s theater as of Oct. 9, 2026.
The Associated Press reported that the Dubuque rally was part of Trump’s final weekend of campaigning before the midterm elections. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3, two days after the rally.
