WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday admitted he wanted to have Syrian President Bashar al-Assad assassinated, but then-Defense Secretary James Mattis stood in his way.

In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump said: “I would’ve rather taken him out. I had it all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it.”

The comments contradict Trump’s 2018 denial. Responding then to reporting in Bob Woodward’s book “Fear” that Trump had ordered Assad’s assassination, the president said the idea was “never even discussed” and that “the book is total fiction.”

It’s believed Trump voiced his wishes to have Assad killed in April 2017 just after a chemical strike that killed dozens of people, including children, in northern Syria.

According to Woodward’s reporting, after Trump ordered Assad to be killed, the defense secretary told the president he would “get right on it” but then developed a more measured plan for an airstrike on targets that Trump approved.

Asked Tuesday if he regretted not killing Assad, Trump said: “No, I don’t regret that. I could’ve lived with it either way with that. I considered [Assad] certainly not a good person. But I had a shot to take him out if I wanted, but Mattis was against it.”

Trump then ripped into Mattis, calling him a "highly overrated general."

“I let him go,” the president said. “He worked for Obama. He got fired by Obama also. And I thought that was maybe just a fluke, maybe they had different views. And he wanted the job very badly. I gave him the job. I didn’t like him. I fired him. And he was, to me, a terrible general. He was a bad leader.”

Trump praised Mattis upon his resignation, saying that he was "retiring, with distrinction" and "greatly thanked" him for his service.

A four-star Marine general, Mattis resigned in December 2018 in protest of Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and the president’s rejection of international alliances.