Trump says he wants to help pick Iran’s next leader

What happened?

President Donald Trump on Thursday said he needed to be involved in picking the next leader of Iran after Israel assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening strikes of the U.S.-Israeli war. Mojtaba Khamenei, the slain leader’s 56-year-old son, is widely viewed as the frontrunner as a panel of Iranian clerics votes on a successor. Trump told Axios the younger Khamenei was a “lightweight” and “unacceptable to me.”

Who said what

“I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela,” Trump told Axios. “We’re going to have to choose that person along with Iran,” he said to Reuters. Trump told reporters on Tuesday that “most of the people we had in mind” to become supreme leader were killed in airstrikes.

Trump’s comments “represent an extraordinary claim of American power over Iran’s political future, further muddying the objectives of the massive U.S. military campaign he launched,” Axios said. Iran has “delayed the naming of a successor” due to “security concerns following American and Israeli comments that the new leader could also be targeted,” The New York Times said. U.S. and Israel have “decimated the highest ranks of political and military leadership,” The Washington Post said, but six days of airstrikes have “not threatened the Iranian regime’s grip on power.”

What next?

Mojtaba Khamenei would represent the “continuity of hard-line conservative rule,” the Times said. But it isn’t clear that “the Revolutionary Guards, who are the real power in Iran,” will “defer” to the 88 elderly clerics choosing the next supreme leader, Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told NPR. “And I think that the next supreme leader of Iran is not going to be the incredibly powerful figure that Ayatollah Khamenei came to be.”