“Hitting Iran hard”: Trump soft-sells “troops on the ground” via Fox News

Donald Trump seems to know that deploying ground troops to Iran to continue a historically unpopular war will hurt his standing. The president turned to television hosts to float the idea on Saturday, promoting Fox News host Mark Levin before the anchor promoted a small-scale invasion.

“Watch Mark Levin interview of Brilliant Marc Thiessen tonight,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Will discuss the importance of hitting Iran, HARD!!!”

Viewers who took the president’s advice were pitched on sending small teams of “specialized” soldiers to Iran, with the hopes of removing enriched uranium from the country.

“Why would we need troops on the ground? Well, there’s a lot of reasons—and we wouldn’t need 300,000 of them,” Levin said. “[Trump’s] not talking about sending regular Army infantry in by the hundreds of thousands. The men he’s talking about, the units he’s talking about, they are specialized.”

As the war in Iran stretches past the one-month mark, it’s unclear whether Trump’s hinting indicates a real desire for escalation or a negotiation tactic. Pentagon insiders who spoke to Salon said that the president “might actually think that he can threaten to send in troops without ever having to do it,” betting on the U.S. superior firepower to cause Iran to fold.

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“We wouldn’t be the first to mistakenly think a smarter bomb will keep us from putting boots on the ground,” the source said.

Watch Levin’s pitch via YouTube below:

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