Donald Trump just admitted that his administration had candidates in mind to lead Iran after the U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—but those candidates are now dead because of those same strikes.
“The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” Trump told ABC News in a phone call Sunday night.
“It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead,” the president continued. “Second or third place is dead.”
Let that sink in. The U.S. launched a massive military strike on a sovereign nation with a plan for who would take over afterward—and then killed all those people in the strike itself.
When asked by The New York Times what should happen next, Trump offered what the paper called “several seemingly contradictory visions” of how a transfer of power might work. He pointed to Venezuela as a model, where the U.S. abducted and imprisoned Nicolás Maduro in January, leaving his vice president in charge.
“What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump said.
Trump also expressed hope that Iran’s military would “hand their weapons over to the Iranian people” and “really surrender to the people, if you think about it.”
He claimed to still have “three very good choices” for who could lead the country, but declined to name them. Meanwhile, Iran’s top security official announced the country would be led by an interim committee until a successor is chosen.
The 86-year-old Khamenei, who had ruled Iran since 1989, was killed Saturday alongside Iran’s defense minister and the commander of its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. More than 40 senior Iranian security and regime figures died in the joint American and Israeli strikes over the weekend, according to an Israeli security official who spoke to Fox News.
Trump did claim that someone within the Iranian government had reached out to him—someone who survived the attacks and was “no longer reporting to the Supreme Leader”—but wouldn’t say who.
Iran has already responded with retaliatory strikes on U.S. allies across the Middle East, including Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which host American military bases. Iran’s UN ambassador had warned in a February 20 letter that “all U.S. military bases, facilities, and assets in the region would constitute legitimate targets” if the U.S. attacked.
On Truth Social, Trump described Khamenei’s death as the “single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country” and announced that bombing would continue “uninterrupted throughout the week, or as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!”
The bombing, apparently, will continue until morale improves.