The Iranian council chose their new leader, a nepo baby son of the former Ayatollah. Trump said before the announcement:
“Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy in Venezuela.
That demand is one of the most delusional he’s made since this whole thing has started, second only to the fact that he keeps comparing Venezuela to Iran which is completely daft.
In case you haven’t seen the dossier on the new leader, Axios provided a nice concise one:
Mojtaba, Ali’s second-eldest son, was born in 1969. His childhood was shaped by both the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the previous dynasty and by his father’s rise to power, first as president in 1981, then as supreme leader in 1989.
- A cleric, Mojtaba studied under the late Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who called for killing Iranian youths who promoted “Western immorality.”
Mojtaba joined the Revolutionary Guard at 17, serving during the Iran-Iraq War in the Habib Battalion.
- The battalion is a “notoriously ideological unit” led by one of the founders of Hezbollah, according to the Atlantic Council. Many of its alumni later became high-ranking members of the regime’s security and intelligence bodies.
Between the lines: Mojtaba is expected to be more hardline than his father, and his ascent means the Iranian regime may get more repressive.
- He has close ties to some of the most “ideologically extremist clerics” who have been at the forefront of the regime’s most violent crackdowns, per the Council.
- Mojtaba also allegedly engineered the 2005 election that installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. In the 2009 election, protesters flooded the streets to insist Ahmadinejad didn’t win again, and Mojtaba reportedly personally supervised how the IRGC crushed these demonstrations.
- Mojtaba reportedly oversees a massive business empire of luxury properties and investments worldwide, according to Bloomberg.
- He does not list the investments under his name but has amassed wealth despite 2019 U.S. sanctions for his role in his father’s inner circle.
- At the time, the Treasury said Mojtaba worked to “advance his father’s destabilizing regional ambitions and oppressive domestic objectives.”
He may be a lightweight, I don’t know. He does, in fact, seem a bit like Don Jr., what with all the corrupt investments. And he’s a hard line extremist too. So maybe he’s just a clown like the Trump boys are. But it appears to be done and Trump isn’t going to have a say in it.