Trump signals willingness to talk to new Iranian leadership as strikes continue

Washington — President Trump said Sunday that he is willing to speak with the new leadership in Iran following the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s longtime leader, who was killed in Israeli airstrikes on Saturday.

“They want to talk, and I have agreed to talk, so I will be talking to them. They should have done it sooner. They should have given what was very practical and easy to do sooner. They waited too long,” Mr. Trump told The Atlantic in a phone call on Sunday morning. 

A senior White House official said later in the day that the president will speak with the Iranians “eventually,” but “[f]or now, Operation Epic Fury continues unabated,” referring to the ongoing bombing campaign by the U.S. and Israel.

Khamenei’s death has led to questions about who will now take power, with no clear successor in place. Dozens more top Iranian officials were also killed in strikes, further complicating the path forward. Mr. Trump and other officials have urged the Iranian people to overthrow the regime altogether, but the likelihood of a mass uprising succeeding is far from certain.

Sen. Tom Cotton, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on Sunday that “I don’t think anyone can give you a simple answer” on who will succeed Khamenei, who had been in power since 1989. 

“There’s probably a lot of jockeying inside of Iran right now. They have a very consultative, deliberative process to replace the supreme leader. There’s a reason why he didn’t want to have a clear succession plan in place. It’s hard to do that when the United States is pummeling their leadership every moment of the day,” Cotton said. 

“I’m sure, though, that there are also some leaders inside of Iran who might be jockeying to audition for the role of Iran’s Delcy Rodriguez,” Cotton added, referring to the interim president of Venezuela, who took power with the support of the U.S. after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro in January. 

The U.S. and Iran had been engaged in weeks of talks over the country’s nuclear program in the lead-up to the beginning of the strikes on Saturday. U.S. officials, including the president, had expressed frustration that the Iranians were not acquiescing to demands that they abandon their nuclear program and engage in talks over their missile capability and support for proxy groups in the region.

In his conversation with The Atlantic, the president said that many of the officials involved in negotiations have been killed.

“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,” he said. “They should have done it sooner … They could have made a deal. They should’ve done it sooner. They played too cute.”