President Trump dodges question on whether Iran’s new leader will be targeted
President Trump said he was “disappointed” by Iran’s choice of supreme leader, declining to say whether the leader had a target on his back.
President Donald Trump said on March 9 that he was “disappointed” that Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s supreme leader, who was killed days earlier, had been named his father’s successor.
“I’m disappointed because I think we’re going to see more of the same problems for this country,” Trump said at a news conference in Doral, Florida. “So I was disappointed to see their choices.”
As the U.S. and Israel’s war against Iran enters its 10th day, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 56, a Shiite cleric and son of late Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been declared the new leader.
The United States sanctioned Mojtaba Khamenei in 2019 for acting on his father’s behalf to advance his father’s “destabilizing regional ambitions and repressive domestic goals,” according to a 2019 announcement from the U.S. Treasury Department.
Although he has never been elected or appointed to any government position, he represented his father in an official capacity and worked closely with commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-QF (IRGC-QF) and the Basij Resistance Forces (Basij) paramilitary group, the US government said in its sanctions.
The selection of Mojtaba Khamenei also contradicts President Trump’s statement that he must be “involved” in selecting the new leader.
“I cannot accept Khamenei’s son,” he told Axios, calling him “frivolous”.
On March 4, when reports were circulating that Khamenei’s second son was the frontrunner to succeed him, President Trump told TIME: “I’m not going to go through something like this to get a second Khamenei.” “They can choose, but they have to make sure they are reasonable people for the United States.”
On Monday, after Khamenei was announced as leader, President Trump said at a news conference in Florida that the war would end “pretty quickly.”
“We went out a little bit because we felt we had to do that to eliminate evil,” he said. So, I think you can see that this is going to be a short excursion.
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is USA TODAY’s White House correspondent. You can follow her at X @SwapnaVenugopal.
