President Trump said Tuesday that the “worst case” scenario in his war with Iran is a new political leader who is “as bad as” assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“I guess the worst case would be, we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person, right?” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
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“That could happen. We don’t want that to happen. That would probably be the worst: You go through this, and then in five years you realize you put somebody in that was no better. So we’d like to see somebody in there that’s going to bring it back for the people.”
Trump said exiled crown prince Reza Pahlavi isn’t at the top of his list, despite his prominence in the opposition movement.
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“Some people like him, and we haven’t been thinking about too much about that,” Trump said.
“It would seem to me that somebody from within, maybe, would be more appropriate. I’ve said that he looks like a very nice person, but it would seem to me that somebody that’s there that’s currently popular, if there’s such a person, but we have people like that. We have people that were more moderate.”
