WASHINGTON — President Trump told The Post Monday that he’s not ruling out sending US ground troops into Iran “if they were necessary” — and declared “I don’t care about polling” after launching strikes Saturday to decapitate Iran’s military and political leadership.
Trump said 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.
“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.’”
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.
“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.”
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 Iranians 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 a final decision to strike “after the final talks” Thursday in Geneva — in part because of intelligence that Iran was working in a “totally different area” 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.’”
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