WASHINGTON — President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — adding that Operation Epic Fury was “way ahead of schedule” by taking out dozens of Tehran’s top officials.
“I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground — like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it,” Trump said after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
Trump told the Daily Mail on Sunday that he estimated the war would last “four weeks or so,” but hinted to The Post Monday that timeframe could be shortened.
“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” he said. “We’re right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership — 49 killed — and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day.”
Trump also said that he wasn’t concerned about Iran using terrorism to repay America for the weekend’s attack.
“We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said.
The president said that he made the final decision to strike “after the final talks” Thursday in Geneva — in part because of intelligence that Iran was surreptitiously resuming work on nuclear projects.
“We had very serious negotiations, and they were there, and then they pulled back,” he said.
“They wanted to make a nuclear weapon, so we destroyed them completely, but we found they were in a totally different site — totally different — because the sites that we took out were permanent. They tried to use them, but they were totally, as I said correctly before, obliterated, right? So then we found them working on a totally different area, a totally different site, in order to make a nuclear weapon through enrichment — so it was just time.”
“I said, ‘Let’s go.’”
Trump insisted that he believes that he did “the right thing” and that most Americans support him — despite initial polling indicating otherwise — arguing that allowing “crazy people” to acquire a nuclear weapon would have been worse than even a regional conflict.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted Saturday and Sunday found that just 27% of Americans approved of the strikes — while 43% disapproved and 29% weren’t sure. Polling ahead of the strikes showed similar minority support for a possible war.
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling. I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago,” Trump said.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the United States’ airstrikes on Iran:
- Three US service members killed, 5 seriously wounded in Operation Epic Fury
- Trump reveals US destroyed 9 ‘important’ Iranian naval ships — and is ‘going after the rest’
- The US and Israel tracked Khamenei for months — and then he gave them a massive opportunity to take him out
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s ex-president who said ‘Israel must be wiped off the map,’ killed in Israeli airstrikes
- Who will lead Iran next? After Khamenei’s death, opposition leaders jockey for power
“I don’t think the polling is low,” he went on. “Look, whether polling is low or not, I think the polling is probably fine. But it’s not a question of polling. You cannot let Iran, who’s a nation that has been run by crazy people, have a nuclear weapon.
“I think people are very impressed with what is happening, actually,” Trump insisted. “I think it’s a silent — if you did a real poll, the silent poll — and it’s like a silent majority.”
