They are all dead! Trump says US-identified candidates to lead Iran after Khamenei were killed in initial strike

Donald Trump revealed on Sunday evening that the United States had identified potential successors to lead Iran following the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — but that those very candidates were eliminated in the opening salvo of the joint American-Israeli assault, leaving Tehran without an obvious heir to its theocratic leadership.

"The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates," Trump told Karl. “It's not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”

"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 Iranian-linked plots to assassinate Trump in 2024.

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. A second incident followed in September, when a man was arrested after allegedly positioning a rifle at Trump whilst he was golfing at his course in West Palm Beach, Florida.

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 had been tasked by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with planning Trump's killing.

Whether a direct operational link between Iran and the Pennsylvania shooting was ever formally established remains a matter of contested intelligence assessment. Trump, however, has consistently drawn the connection.

Iranian state television confirmed his death hours after Trump announced the killing, describing Khamenei as "one of the most evil people in history." Iran's Revolutionary Guards responded by launching what they called the "most ferocious" retaliatory operation in the organisation's history, targeting Israel and American military installations across Gulf states that 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 assault, has left the Islamic Republic in a state of profound institutional rupture — its chain of command severed, its succession pipeline apparently eliminated, and its military now operating on a war footing without clear political direction from above.

The Islamic Republic's constitution designates the Assembly of Experts as the body responsible for selecting a new supreme leader. But with senior figures across Iran's clerical and military establishment killed or in hiding, and the country under active bombardment, the mechanics of an orderly transition appear, for the moment, entirely theoretical.

Trump has warned that American strikes will continue until all of Washington's objectives are achieved. What those objectives now look like — 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.