As Iran retaliates, largest US military base in Middle East hit by ballistic missile, Qatar says

President Donald Trump did not rule out U.S. troops on the ground in Iran during an exclusive interview with the New York Post on Monday.

“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 New York Post. "I say, ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.'”

While the president told the Daily Mail on Sunday that the operation in Iran could take up to four weeks, the president on Monday told the New York Post that the operation is "going to go 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,” Trump said, referring to the number of Iranian leaders he said were killed in the attacks on Iran.

-ABC News’ Michelle Stoddart

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran who was killed in Saturday’s strikes, was having a breakfast meeting with senior aides at the time, and they were “thinking they were safe because it was in broad daylight,” President Donald Trump told Fox News.

Trump also told Fox News that 49 senior Iranian leaders were killed in the initial strikes. Over the weekend, Trump said 48 senior leaders were killed.

-ABC News’ Fritz Farrow

President Donald Trump told CNN on Monday that the U.S. military is “knocking the crap” out of Iran and the “big wave” is yet to come.

“We haven’t even started hitting them hard. The big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon,” Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a phone call.

Congressional staff were told by Trump administration officials in private briefings Sunday that Iran was not preparing to launch a preemptive strike against U.S. interests based on U.S. intelligence reports, four people familiar with the briefing told ABC News. CNN was the first to report this news.

This conflicts with what President Donald Trump and senior Trump administration officials said over the weekend.

The administration officials said there were indicators the Iranians could launch a preemptive attack against U.S. forces and allies in the region.

Trump said in his video address to the nation on Saturday, "Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime."

Trump told ABC News on Saturday, “I think there was a threat."

"Had we not done 'Midnight Hammer,'" he said, referring to the U.S. strikes on Iran in June 2025, "which was one of the greatest things country has ever done, we would’ve been faced with a nuclear weapon within a month.”

-ABC News’ Rachel Scott, Shannon Kingston, Ben Siegel, Luke Barr