Trump says Iran wants to negotiate after assassination of supreme leader: ‘They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute’
Donald Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday that Iran wants to negotiate after U.S. and Israeli forces carried out a wave of strikes across the country that resulted in the death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
The U.S. president’s remarks come just a day after the bombing campaign began and as much of Iran’s government reportedly remains intact, including the presidency of Mahmoud Pezeshkian.
Trump confirmed to The Atlantic’s Michael Sherer that he’d agreed to resume negotiations with Iranian officials, telling the news outlet: “They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them.
“They should have done it sooner,” the president added. “They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long.”
He said some Iranian officials involved in the previous talks were no longer alive.
“Most of those people are gone. Some of the people we were dealing with are gone, because that was a big — that was a big hit. They should have done it sooner, Michael. They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute.”
Iran’s foreign ministry hasn’t confirmed that negotiations with the U.S. will resume, and Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi accused the U.S. of blowing up those talks with the launch of attacks on Saturday.
Speaking on ABC’s This Week, Araghchi told host George Stephanopoulos that the process to select a new supreme leader was already underway, while defending his country’s “legitimate right” to defend itself and retaliate against U.S. forces in the region.
Since the conflict began early Saturday morning dozens have been killed across Iran, including at a girls’ school where 148 are reported dead in what Iranian officials have denounced as a “massacre”. Top Iranian commanders have been targeted in the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign, which according to Aragchi has left some Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) units isolated and outside of the direct command structure.
U.S. officials met in Geneva with Iranian diplomats led by Araghchi on Thursday. After two exhaustive sessions, Axios reports that the two sides were still far away on key details. The Trump team, led by Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, presented the Iranians with a steep list of demands including the end of Iranian uranium enrichment capacity and the surrender of all enriched uranium to U.S. hands, in exchange for limited future sanctions relief.
Among the U.S. demands in the list presented last week was the permanent destruction of three Iranian nuclear sites struck by the Trump administration last summer: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. The sites are thought to be key facilities involved in the creation of weapons-grade nuclear materials and the development of those materials into weapons.
The White House claimed they were utterly destroyed by U.S. bombs last year, raising questions about the necessity of their re-destruction as well as a statement from Witkoff last month claiming that Iran was only days away from development of a nuclear weapon. The president accused Iran of attempting to reinvigorate its nuclear program during his State of the Union address to Congress last Tuesday night.
In the wake of U.S. strikes, Trump has urged Iranian citizens and the IRGC to topple the country’s government in social media posts, but there’s no indication yet that the Iranian government in Tehran is at risk of imminent collapse.
