Donald Trump, throughout his career in politics, has always talked about the need to make peace and to avoid protracted foreign wars. He ran for president in 2016 by railing against the Iraq war and concepts like nation-building and long foreign entanglements. Trump has also frequently claimed that his opponents, from Hillary Clinton to Kamala Harris, would take the nation to war while he would bring peace.
The current war in Iran, which was launched last Friday, threatens to upend all of that. And now, he’s talking about possibly putting American boots on the ground.
In an interview with the New York Post over the weekend, the president did not rule out sending ground troops to Iran.
“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 told the Post on Saturday. “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’”
“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 tells the @nypost https://t.co/zlw5rQBmB4
— Chris Megerian (@ChrisMegerian) March 2, 2026
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“It’s going to go pretty quickly,” Trump told the Post. “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.”
When asked about the possibility of terrorists striking at U.S. targets in retaliation, Trump answered, “We’ll take it out. Whatever. It’s like everything else, we’ll take it out.”
Trump also told the Post some details about the negotiations that preceded the attack.
“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,” the president told the newspaper. “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.”
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
