Trump admits ‘worst case’ in Iran strikes could see new leader ‘as bad or worse than the ayatollah’

Donald Trump offered little in the way of an optimistic view of Iran’s future on Monday during a bilateral meeting with German Chanceller Friedrich Merz at the White House.

Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, the president took his first extended Q&A on the military campaign launched by the U.S. on Saturday morning.

Trump gave no indication of who the U.S. hoped would assume leadership of Iran’s government in the days to come, explaining that many potential candidates had been killed in the first round of strikes. He also admitted that his actions could result in a leader with even more fervent anti-U.S. sentiment coming to power.

“I guess the worst case is we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person,” Trump admitted. “That could happen.”

“Most of the people we had in mind [to lead Iran] are dead,” the president continued. “Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

The U.S., along with Israel, began targeted strikes on Iranian targets early Saturday morning. Those strikes are now confirmed to have killed Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei.

In the days following the White House and GOP have faced questions about what this means for both the U.S. and Iran, including whether America is now involved in an extended war in the Middle East and who the Trump administration hopes will take over the Iranian government in the wake of a devastating campaign intended to decapitate the regime and its military.

Top Trump administration officials have offered differing explanations for the necessity of the attacks, which were reportedly authorized only a day after top U.S. negotiators met with Iranian diplomats in Geneva. Among the reasons for launching the strikes have been the supposed resumption of Iran’s nuclear weapons development, the imminent threat supposedly posed by its non-nuclear ballistic missile program, and the negotiators’ refusal to address non-nuclear weapons and support for terrorist groups like the Houthis in Geneva.

Trump offered yet another explanation on Monday: He believed that the Iranian’s planned to launch their own attack first. He gave no evidence for this.

“We were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” said the president. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first, I felt strongly about that.”

The answer came in response to a reporter’s question about the claim that Israeli officials had forced Trump’s hand by informing him of their own plans to launch strikes against Iran.

“We have great negotiators, great people, people who do this very successfully. And based on the way that the negotiations was going, I think that they were going to attack first. And I didn’t want that to happen. So if anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand. But Israel was ready and we were ready,” said Trump.

During the meeting Trump lashed out at two NATO allies, Spain and the U.K., as well. The president attacked the former for preventing U.S. forces from using Spanish military bases for the Iran war effort, and the latter for a similar issue with the Diego Garcia base in the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean.

Referring to the U.K.’s Keir Starmer, Trump remarked twice that the prime minister was no “Winston Churchill”, telling reporters: “I will say the UK has been very, very uncooperative with that stupid island that they have, that they gave away and took a 100-year lease; having to do with, perhaps, indigenous people claiming the island that never even saw the island before. What’s that all about?”

“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”

White House officials who spoke to reporters on Monday explained that negotiators who met with their Iranian counterparts in Geneva last Thursday came prepared to address both the Iranian nuclear program and other aspects of conflict between Washington and Tehran, including the broader threat that Iran’s ballistic missiles pose across the region.

According to those officials, Iranian officials who were present at that meeting indicated that future nuclear enrichment capabilities were a red line, an “inalienable right” which Iranian officials would not surrender.

“We said to them that you may have that if you may deem that to be your right, we deem our right the ability to stop that, and we’re going to stop it, and we’re not going to allow it,” claimed a senior Trump administration figure.

Axios reported over the weekend that Trump authorized the strikes against Iran on Friday, just hours after being briefed by negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner about the gulf that still separated the Iranian and American positions in the talks.

In the strikes so far, hundreds of Iranians are confirmed dead while retaliatory Iranian missile and rocket attacks have taken place in numerous countries across the Middle East, killing some including six service members. That number has climbed slowly since Saturday.

While the White House’s assertion that Iran presented an existential threat to the region has been accepted by the U.S.’s European allies, its explanation that Iran was once again “days” or “weeks” from developing weapons-grade nuclear material or a bomb itself has not.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, denied to CNN that Iran had the capacity to produce such results in such a short time period.

“It is an evaluation that is based on the fact that Iran has a very big, ambitious nuclear program, that we do not have the accesses that we should have” Grossi also reportedly said, according to The Wall Street Journal. “At the same time, I have said…we don’t see a structured program to manufacture nuclear weapons.”