Trump Refuses to Rule Out ‘Boots on the Ground’ in Iran: ‘I Have to Do the Right Thing’

U.S. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto via AP)

President Donald Trump refused to rule out deploying U.S. ground troops to Iran “if they were necessary” on Monday, saying he didn’t “have the yips” about “boots on the ground” like his predecessors, as he insisted he had “to do the right thing” no matter what.

In an exclusive interview with The New York Post on Monday, the president said he would not make the blanket pledges on the issue he said had been made by previous administrations.

“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,” he said. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”

The remarks come after joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Saturday targeted Iran’s military and political leadership.

The Post pressed Trump on the results of a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted over the weekend that found 27% approved of the strikes, 43% disapproved, and 29% were unsure.

Trump dismissed the numbers, replying: “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.”

He continued: “I don’t think the polling is low. 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 added. “I think it’s a silent – if you did a real poll, the silent poll – and it’s like a silent majority.”

Trump said that the final decision to act on strikes came after intelligence he received about the regime pursuing its nuclear program amid ongoing negotiations.

“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.”

Speaking of ongoing operations, the president said the campaign was advancing “pretty quickly.”

​​“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,” he explained.

Asked about potential retaliation from Iran, he was blunt: “We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out.”

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