Donald Trump said America was “knocking the c–p” out of Iran and a “big wave” of strikes was still to come.
Speaking to CNN, the US president suggested the strikes that killed Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and other high-ranking officials in the early hours of Saturday were just the start of his military campaign.
“We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon,” Mr Trump told CNN.
Mr Trump is speaking to the media this afternoon at a Medal of Honour ceremony.
He also refused to rule out American boots on the ground in Iran during an interview with the New York Post.
“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. I say ‘probably don’t need them’ [or] ‘if they were necessary’.”
Mr Trump’s most senior general said today that the US military would send more troops to the Middle East.
More “tactical aviation” – which could include fighter jets and drones – would be sent to the region after three days of air strikes, Gen Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Pentagon press conference.
In a warning to America’s adversaries, Gen Caine said: “We can reach you, we can sustain the fight and we will scale the fight.”
Trump: ‘had to do it the right way’
Donald Trump said the US had believed it was close to securing a deal with Iran before Tehran “backed out”, leaving Washington with no choice but to act.
“We thought we had a deal and then they backed out,” he said. “We had to do it the right way.”
The president insisted American forces would “easily prevail” and claimed operations were already “substantially ahead of time projections”.
While the initial timeline had been “four to five weeks”, Mr Trump said the US had the capability to continue for longer if necessary. “I don’t get bored — there’s nothing boring about this,” he added.
He also boasted that a plan projected to take four weeks to eliminate Iran’s military leadership had been completed “within an hour”.
The United States will continue “large-scale operations” to eliminate what Donald Trump described as the “grave threat posed by a terrible terrorist regime”, the president said at a press conference on Tuesday.
Mr Trump claimed Washington had warned Iran not to attempt to rebuild military capabilities at alternative sites, but said the regime had “ignored those warnings” and refused to abandon its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
According to the president, Tehran already possessed missiles capable of striking Europe and would “soon have had missiles capable of hitting our beautiful America”.
“Everyone was behind us — they just didn’t have the courage to say so,” he added, arguing that the US itself would have been under direct threat had it not acted.
“For almost 47 years this regime has been attacking the United States and killing Americans,” Mr Trump said. “Every time you see someone with a shattered face or killed violently, it was almost certainly the Iranians.”
He described the current campaign as the regime’s “last best chance to strike”, signalling that further action could follow.
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