Donald Trump revealed on Sunday night that the United States had identified potential successors to lead Iran after the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – but that those very candidates were knocked out in the opening salvo of a joint US-Israeli attack, leaving Tehran without an heir apparent to its theocratic leadership.
Trump: “Second or third place is dead”
The remarks, shared by ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl in Washington, came during a phone call with the president Sunday night.
The remarks, shared by ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl in Washington, came during a phone call with the president Sunday night and represent the most candid public accounting yet of what the strikes actually accomplished — and destroyed — in terms of Iran’s political future.
Read also | US war in Iran LIVE: Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura refinery hit by drone
“The attack was so successful that it took out most of the candidates,” Trump told Karl. “It won’t be anyone we thought of because they’re all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
‘I got him before he got me’: Trump on Khamenei’s death
In a separate phone call Sunday night, Trump directly addressed Khamenei’s death, framing it in strikingly personal terms.
In a separate phone call Sunday night, Trump directly addressed Khamenei’s death, framing it in strikingly personal terms.
“I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first,” Trump said.
The statement is a reference to what United States intelligence agencies have assessed as an Iran-linked plot to assassinate Trump in 2024.
2024 Assassination: What Trump Was Talking About
US President Trump’s claim that Iran “tried twice” to kill him echoes a series of incidents in 2024 that rocked US security services and shaped the intelligence community’s assessment of Iran’s intent against the then-candidate and later president.
In July 2024, Trump was struck by a bullet that grazed his ear during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, when a gunman opened fire on the crowd. The second incident followed in September, when a man was arrested after allegedly pointing a rifle at Trump while he was playing golf at his course in West Palm Beach, Florida.
Read also | How a US-Israel war with Iran could affect India’s oil, trade and energy security
Later that year, federal authorities charged Farhad Shakeri — an Afghan national deported from the United States in 2008 — in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Trump. The Justice Department described Shakeri as an “Iranian asset” who was tasked by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with planning Trump’s assassination.
Whether a direct operational link between Iran and the Pennsylvania shooting was ever formally established remains a matter of contested intelligence assessment. But Trump has consistently drawn the connection.
Khamenei dies at age 86: End of 35-year rule
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – Iran’s supreme leader since 1989, mastermind of its nuclear ambitions and one of the most persistent opponents of Western power in the modern era – was killed in the opening salvo of US-Israeli strikes. He was 86.
Read also | Defense stocks, drone stocks rally as US and Israel attack Iran
Iranian state television confirmed his death hours after Trump announced the killing, calling Khamenei “one of the worst people in history.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guards responded by launching what it called the “wildest” retaliatory operation in the organization’s history, targeting Israel and US military installations across the Gulf states, which are now absorbing an unprecedented wave of deadly Iranian strikes.
The loss of Khamenei, combined with the deaths of up to 40 senior Iranian officials in the same attack, has left the Islamic Republic in a state of deep institutional rift – its chain of command has been severed, its succession apparently removed, and its military now operating on a war footing with no clear political direction from the top.
What comes next: Iran without a succession plan?
Trump’s admission that Washington’s preferred post-Khameneim candidates are dead raises a question that neither the White House nor Tehran can currently answer: who is leading Iran now?
Read also | Global airline stocks fell as much as 12% during the US-Iran war.
The Constitution of the Islamic Republic designates the Assembly of Experts as the body responsible for selecting a new Supreme Leader. But with senior figures in Iran’s clerical and military establishment killed or in hiding and the country under active bombardment, the mechanism for an orderly transition appears to be entirely theoretical at this point.
Trump has warned that US strikes will continue until all of Washington’s goals are met. What those goals look like now – in a country whose potential new leadership has been destroyed alongside the old – remains the defining unanswered question of a war that is only three days old.
