'I don't have the yips': Trump says he's considering boots on the ground in Iran
President Donald Trump hasn't ruled out sending U.S. ground forces into Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury.
The 79-year-old president ordered joint U.S.-Israeli airstrikes that resulted in the killing of Iran's supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and dozens of other top officials, but Trump told the New York Post he would consider putting troops on the ground.
"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. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.'”
Trump had said over the weekend that he estimated the war would last “four weeks or so," but he told the Post that he believes hostilities could be even shorter.
“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” Trump 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.”
The president also insisted he wasn't concerned that Iran could respond to the strikes with terrorist attacks.
“We’ll take it out, whatever – it’s like everything else, we’ll take it out,” Trump said.
Trump told the newspaper that he decided to order the strikes following "final talks" Thursday in Geneva due to intelligence reports that Iran was 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,'" he added.
Polling conducted by Reuters/Ipsos Saturday and Sunday found just 27 percent of Americans approved of the strikes, but Trump said he believes the public broadly supports his decision.
“I think that the polling is very good, but I don’t care about polling," Trump said. "I have to do the right thing. I have to do the right thing. This should have been done a long time ago."
“I don’t think the polling is low,” he added. “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. I think it’s a silent — if you did a real poll, the silent poll — and it’s like a silent majority.”