President Donald Trump called into a Fox News star’s radio show with a weird statement to admit he doesn’t know if Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is dead or alive.
“I think he’s damaged. But I think he’s probably alive in some form,” Trump told Fox Radio host Brian Kilmeade on Kilmeade’s Fox Radio show.
Mojtaba Khamenei replaced his father, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, the Shia cleric who was the Supreme Leader of Iran from 1989 until his death in the first wave of bombing in Trump’s war.
In his first address to his country, Mojtaba Khamenei vowed to “avenge the blood” of Iranians killed in what the Trump administration calls “Operation Epic Fury,” and to continue blocking the world’s busiest oil shipping channel, the Strait of Hormuz.
The statement was read out on Iranian state TV by a broadcaster, not by Mojtaba Khamenei himself. Kilmeade brought this up in a phone interview with Trump.
“We don’t see him, he doesn’t read the speech, they say he wrote the speech. First off, do you believe he’s alive?” the Fox & Friends host asked, prompting the eyebrow-raising response from the president.
“I think he probably is, I think he’s damaged. But I think he’s probably alive in some form, yeah,” Trump said.
Kilmeade failed to seize on Trump’s muddled response, instead asking POTUS about Mojtaba Khamenei’s threats. “Well, they’ve been doing a lot of talking, so he’s going to have to put up. We’ll have to see because we are decimating them,” Trump said.
“We’ve knocked out most of their missiles. We’ve knocked out many of their drones. We knocked out a lot of the manufacturing areas where they manufacture the missiles and now the drones. We’re hitting them harder than anybody’s been hit since World War II.”
However, it appears Iran does have leverage as a result of its repeated attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which is the main point of global transit for Gulf oil. The attacks have strangled supply, sending crude oil prices surging.
This has forced Trump to turn to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. On Thursday, the administration announced that previously sanctioned Russian oil can now flow freely until April, handing a huge financial boon and strategic victory to the Kremlin.
Even so, the price remained above $100 per barrel at the opening of Asian markets on Friday morning.
Indeed, the move prompted a victory lap from Russian officials. “The United States is effectively acknowledging the obvious: without Russian oil, the global energy market cannot remain stable,” Russia’s economic envoy Kirill Dmitriev posted on Telegram.
“Amid the growing energy crisis, further easing of restrictions on Russian energy sources appears increasingly inevitable, despite resistance from some in the Brussels bureaucracy,” he added.
Meanwhile, Mojtaba Khamenei’s wife and a son were killed in the U.S.-Israeli strike on the compound that killed his father. His mother was at first said to have died in the attack, but she has since been reported alive. Mojtaba Khamenei himself was reportedly injured.
