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Donald Trump says he is “not happy” with the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as Iran’s new supreme leader.
The United States president had warned repeatedly against electing the son of assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to lead the country as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran intensified.
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“I’m not going through this to end up with another Khamenei. I want to be involved in the selection,” Trump told Time magazine on Friday.
Two days later, Iran’s Assembly of Experts did exactly that – it replaced the slain Khamenei with his 56-year-old son.
The decision was a show of defiance against the US president, who had been stressing for days that Iran would follow the path of Venezuela in selecting a leader willing to answer Washington’s demands.
“I think they made a big mistake,” Trump said on Monday of Khamenei’s appointment.
He also suggested that the new supreme leader may be targeted and killed like his father.
“I don’t know if it’s going to last. I think they made a mistake,” the US president said.
In an interview with the New York Post earlier, Trump declined to provide details about his plans for dealing with the new Iranian leader.
“Not going to tell you. I’m not happy with him,” he said.
Calls for killing the new Iranian leader
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of Trump, also acknowledged that Mojtaba Khamenei was “not the change” the US was looking for.
“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 said on X.
Mark Levin, a pro-Israel commentator close to Trump, who called for killing the elder Khamenei for weeks prior to the war, was quick to shift his messaging after Mojtaba was selected as his father’s successor.
“Get the boy Khamenei!” Levin wrote in a social media post on Monday.
The US and Israel launched a joint attack on Iran on February 28, killing Khamenei and several top officials in the opening strikes, which were followed by thousands of attacks that devastated the country and claimed the lives of more than 1,250 people.
Iran responded with hundreds of missiles and drone launches against Israel and US military assets across the Middle East.
Iranian attacks have also hit energy installations and civilian targets in the Gulf region and largely succeeded in closing down the Hormuz Strait – a major shipping lane for the oil trade.
War has also broken out between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Despite the regional turmoil, which has led to a historic spike in oil prices, Trump has said that he is seeking Iran’s “unconditional surrender”.
He has also suggested that the war was “already won”.
The US president reiterated that sense of confidence on Monday, telling CBS News that the war is progressing “very far ahead of schedule”.
“I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” Trump said, adding that Iran has “nothing left” militarily.
But Trump’s repeated assertions that Iran is on the verge of collapse and that he would be involved in choosing the country’s next leader were met by ridicule in Tehran.
On Friday, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Iran’s fate would be decided by Iranians themselves, not by Jeffrey Epstein’s “gang”, referring to the late sex offender who had ties to rich and powerful figures in the US.
Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), said Trump’s rejection of Mojtaba Khamenei may have inadvertently boosted the newly elected supreme leader’s candidacy.
“It became not a question of who is the best candidate for the next supreme leader, but ‘what do we need to do to protect Iranian sovereignty in the face of this aggression and desire to dictate to Iran what we do internally,'” Costello told Al Jazeera.
“It’s possible Mojtaba Khamenei had the inside track all along, but I do think Trump’s disapproval made it very hard for the system to go in any other direction.”
‘Intense’ blowback
Costello added that although Trump is setting a high ceiling for the war, the US president has lost control of the conflict.
“Trump had very different expectations coming in, that Iran was weak and that they would fold like a deck of cards in a matter of hours,” he said.
Instead, Iran appears to have been able to withstand the initial onslaught despite the heavy blows it absorbed from the US and Israel.
There have been no major defections or significant protests against the ruling system since the war began. And the Iranian military has managed to keep steady fire against Israel and the region.
With Hormuz closed, the price of oil skyrocketing and markets starting to feel the strain of the disruption, the blowback from the US-Israeli war has been “strong and intense”, said Costello.
“The notion that Trump was going to be able to dictate his will inside Iran is very much getting pushed back upon about 10 days into the conflict,” he added.
Some of Trump’s Democratic rivals at home have underscored the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei to accuse the US president of lacking a clear vision for the war that he and Israel started.
Democratic Congressman Jake Auchincloss said Trump replaced “an 86-year-old terrorist dictator with a 56-year-old terrorist dictator”, referring to the Khamenei father and son.
He predicted that the new supreme leader would escalate attacks across the region and “race for nuclear capability”. Iran denies seeking a nuclear weapon.
“Mr President, wtf is your plan?” Auchincloss wrote in a social media post.
