President Trump isn’t mincing words about Iran’s new supreme leader, and the Islamic regime may want to take notice: Trump is “not happy.”
When asked about Iran’s appointment of Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei to replace his \ father as the country’s supreme leader, Trump kept it short.
“Not going to tell you. I’m not happy with him,” Trump told the New York Post.
“I don’t believe he can live in peace,” Trump said in a later interview.
The elder Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who led the repressive Islamic dictatorship for 37 years, was killed on the first day of Operation Epic Fury when joint U.S. and Israeli strikes hit his Tehran headquarters.
Iran’s Assembly of Experts, a body of 88 Islamic radical clerics, has since named his 56-year-old son as his replacement.
Trump had been warning for days that such a move would be unacceptable. Last Thursday he told Axios that Mojtaba Khamenei was a “lightweight” and that he personally needed to be involved in the selection of Iran’s next leader — comparing it to his role in installing new leadership in Venezuela following the U.S. campaign there.
“I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei,” Trump said. “I want to be involved in the selection.”
“I think they made a big mistake,” he said later. “I don’t know if it’s going to last. I think they made a mistake.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a close Trump ally, also said that Khamenei’s time was limited.
“I believe it’s just a matter of time before he meets the same fate as that of his father — one of the most evil men on the planet,” Graham wrote on X.
Mojtaba Khamenei has deep ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the hardline military force responsible for much of Iran’s Islamic terror operations across the globe. His selection signals Iran’s leadership has no intention of negotiating despite devastating losses in the first ten days of the war.
As of Monday, U.S. Central Command reported that more than 5,000 military targets inside Iran had been struck since Operation Epic Fury launched.