President Trump referred to the use of a racial slur during a speech to top military leaders on Tuesday, saying, “There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”

Mr. Trump was speaking to hundreds of American generals and admirals when he got on the subject of nuclear weapons. The word nuclear was not one to “throw around,” he said.

“We can’t let people throw around that word,” the president said. “I call it the n-word. There are two n-words, and you can’t use either of them.”

“You can’t use either of them,” he said again.

It was not the first time Mr. Trump has played with this formulation. In past interviews and in a social media post, he has referred to nuclear as “the n-word.” But in those instances, he did not go so far as to refer to the other more commonly understood usage of the phrase.

The context and setting for the remark was also striking. During the gathering on Tuesday, Mr. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke about getting rid of political correctness in the military. Mr. Hegseth defended his firing of more than a dozen military leaders, many of them people of color and women.

He fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., who is Black; the first woman to command the Navy, Adm. Lisa Franchetti; and the U.S. military’s representative to the NATO military committee, Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield.

—New York Times