“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment,” he said. “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me.”
Trump repeated the sentiment in an ABC News interview, saying the new leader “is not going to last long” if Iranian leaders do not get his approval.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday about the selection of Mojtaba Khamenei as the new supreme leader.
The Israel Defense Forces warned Sunday that any successor to the late Khamenei would be considered a target.
A plume of smoke rises after a strike.
A plume of smoke rises Tuesday after a strike on Tehran.Atta Kenare / AFP – Getty Images
Questions around who will succeed the supreme leader have been complicated by the death of Iran’s then-president, Ebrahim Raisi, long thought of as a possible successor, in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
But the regime will be eager to show Israel, the U.S. and the Iranian people that it isn’t collapsing, Javed Ali, a former senior counterterrorism official and now an associate professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said before the appointment.
“By picking the next supreme leader, that obviously is a signal,” he said.
A Kashmiri Shiite Muslim protester holds a photograph of the
A Shia Muslim mourns the elder Khamenei in Srinagar, Kashmir, on Wednesday.Saqib Majeed / SOPA / LightRocket via Getty Images
Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa program at the London-based think tank Chatham House, said before the appointment that “the signal that such a nomination will give is that nothing will change.”
