Bill O’Reilly has had many private meetings and conversations with President Trump.

This one sticks out above all the rest.

And Bill O’Reilly confessed he made one prediction to Trump that left him heartbroken.

The war against Iran is now in its fifth month.

Polls show that Americans, including an increasing number of Trump supporters, don’t believe the conflict has been worth the economic cost, which has led to gas prices surging to over $4 per gallon.

O’Reilly was an early supporter of the war, but he was skeptical it would go smoothly or quickly and admitted as such in an interview with NewsNation’s Leland Vittert, where he said his prediction ‘haunts’ him.

“My own words haunt me,” O’Reilly admitted.

O’Reilly recounted a conversation he had with Trump just before the war started where O’Reilly said he cautioned Trump that going to war with Iran was the “biggest gamble” he would ever make since the country was ruled by theocrats instead of rational people.

“In February, I talked to the president, just him and me. I said this is the biggest gamble you have ever taken in your entire life messing around with these people. They’re irrational,” O’Reilly stated.

O’Reilly went on to say that it would be unlikely that Iran would surrender to Trump’s demands to give up their nuclear program and that an internal uprising was unlikely.

“They are like the militants in Japan in World War II, in Germany in World War II; they’re not going to surrender. It’s going to be exceedingly difficult, and you cannot count on the Persians to overthrow them,” O’Reilly added.

O’Reilly said the conflict played out as he feared, and now there is no easy way for Trump to end the war, even though he’s confident Trump would end it this second if he could.

“So my words haunt me, because it’s exactly how it came down,” O’Reilly continued.

“No, if he could get out of that thing now, tonight, he would,” O’Reilly concluded.

O’Reilly’s words came 48 hours after Trump said a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reinstate the ceasefire from June’s memorandum of understanding was “imminent.”

Trump said he called off the “biggest attack since World War 2” to give more space for diplomacy.

“I’m not looking to kill people, ’cause people die,” Trump told reporters on Sunday. “A lot of people die. And we don’t want that.” 

This isn’t the first time O’Reilly admitted regret about war in the Middle East.

In recent weeks, O’Reilly apologized for supporting the War in Iraq, saying he fell for fake news in the New York Times about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction.

“I made a mistake with the Iraq situation, and that haunts me to this day,” O’Reilly remarked. “And the reason I made that mistake is that I didn’t fully understand the facts of the matter. I was taking reporting from The New York Times and others that said [former Iraqi dictator] Saddam Hussein was harboring deadly weapons. OK?”

“Turned out to be wrong,” O’Reilly said. “Didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, and the chaos that ensued brought a lot of pain on America. I was wrong. I was wrong. OK, there’s a reason I was wrong, but that still haunts me.”

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