He Won’t Survive Long Without My Approval, Says Trump About Iran’s Next Supreme Leader
President Donald Trump declared Sunday that whoever Iran selects as its next supreme leader will require his personal approval — or face swift consequences.
According to new reports, Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, has been elected as the new supreme leader of Iran.
Trump made the remarks in an interview with ABC News, roughly one week after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his compound on Feb. 28.
The strike eliminated Khamenei along with dozens of other senior Iranian regime officials. American and Israeli intelligence services spent several months gathering information that enabled the operation.
“Going to have to get approval from us,” Trump said of Iran’s future leadership. “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long.”
Trump framed the demand as a long-term strategy to prevent repeated military interventions in the region.
“We want to make sure that we don’t have to go back every 10 years, when you don’t have a president like me that’s not going to do it,” he said.
The president also referenced the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons as a driving concern.
“I don’t want people to have to go back in five years and have to do the same thing again or worse let them have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told ABC News.
When asked whether he would approve a successor with ties to the former Iranian regime — similar to how he handled Delcy Rodríguez becoming acting president of Venezuela following Nicolas Maduro’s capture — Trump answered affirmatively.
“I would, in order to choose a good leader I would, yeah, I would. There are numerous people that could qualify,” he said.
Trump characterized the current state of Iran’s military power in stark terms, calling the nation “a paper tiger.”
He added: “They weren’t a paper tiger a week ago, I’ll tell you. And they were going to attack.”
The president stated that Iran had been planning a broad regional offensive. “Their plan was to attack the entire Middle East, to take over the entire Middle East,” Trump said.
Trump also confirmed that military options inside Iran remain under active consideration. He told ABC News that special forces could be deployed to seize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium. “Everything is on the table. Everything,” he said.
A senior administration official disclosed last week that Iran had accumulated enough enriched uranium to produce weapons-grade material within ten days or less.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a separate rationale for the U.S. entering the conflict.
Rubio told reporters on March 2 that Israel was preparing to strike Iran, which “would precipitate an attack against American forces.”
“We knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after [Iran] before [Israel] launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said.
Trump told ABC News he met with the families of six U.S. soldiers killed in the conflict so far.
When asked if those meetings had diminished his resolve, Trump replied: “No, not at all. The parents would be upset if I did that. The parents said to me, every one of them, please sir, win this for my boy, and in one case a young woman, as you know. Please, win this for my child.”
“They were devastated but proud,” Trump added.
The president declined to offer a timeline for the conflict’s end, but said: “All I can say is we are ahead of schedule both in terms of lethality and in terms of time.”
He had previously stated the conflict would last four to five weeks.
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