President Donald Trump threatened on Friday to open a new front in his administration's military campaign, telling supporters at a rally in Fort Myers, Florida, that the United States could "take Cuba on our way back from Iran."

In Trump's telling, another war is exactly what voters want right now — this time aimed at Cuba. The remark came as the president also appeared to momentarily struggle to recall the name of the government his forces are currently fighting.

"We have the greatest military equipment in the world. You saw that in Venezuela and you see now in...the national," Trump said, pausing before appearing to instruct himself to "think of it." He then exclaimed: "The Islamic Republic of Iran will tell you that we have the best equipment."

A shout from the audience steered the president to a new subject. "He wants to know what about Cuba," Trump said. "Give me a break. Don't worry — we'll take Cuba on our way back from Iran," he added, making a serpentine motion with his hand.

Repeating the gesture, he assured the crowd: "We'll do a little stopover. Actually, what we're gonna do with Cuba is we're going to come back from Iran, those beautiful ships will pass Cuba, we'll have one of them stop about 50 yards off the coast, they'll raise up their hands, and then we're gonna send [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio in to finish up the thing."

Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long kept the island nation in his crosshairs. "All roads have been leading to Cuba for [Rubio]," a longtime acquaintance of the secretary of state told the Guardian. "He has wanted this for a long time and now he finally has the authority [to reach that goal]."

The White House has been open about its designs on Cuba during Trump's second term, particularly following the rapid success of its incursion into Venezuela — an operation seemingly bolstered by the ease with which Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was captured. The administration has levied an oil blockade against Cuba, reportedly causing widespread harm to the Cuban people and stacking new pressure onto an island that has lived under a U.S. embargo for more than six decades. But talk of a military venture against the island has largely faded into the background as Trump's wildly unpopular war with Iran has dragged on — though Friday's remarks suggest the idea has not gone away.

That conflict has fueled public outrage at home over rising prices, driven largely by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — one of the world's most critical chokepoints for global oil shipments — and the resulting increase in fuel costs. Trump addressed the issue in Fort Myers as well, claiming: "Oil prices will soon plummet and oil prices are coming down very substantially. They're coming down much faster. You know, when I did this, we hit the all-time high."

Oil prices are not, in fact, "coming down very substantially." According to the Wall Street Journal, after hitting a five-month high on Thursday, oil prices continued to rise to another high on Friday "as the market remains on edge about the possibility of the Middle East conflict escalating with renewed U.S.-Iran hostilities and further attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure." The gap between the president's claims and the market's direction underscores the stakes of a conflict already squeezing Americans at the pump — and whether the Cuba talk hardens into policy beyond the existing oil blockade is the question to watch.