Trump was once not keen on regime change in Iran – then he lost patience

South China Morning Post · Mar 1, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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With Saturday’s military operation against Iran, US President Donald Trump showed a dramatic evolution in risk tolerance, adjusting in just a matter of months how far he was willing to go in using American military might to confront Tehran’s clerical rule.Guardrails were tossed aside, as Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered up a battle plan that included targeted strikes on Iran’s leadership, including the 86-year-old Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose death Trump triumphantly announced in a social media post hours after launching the military operation.For Trump, it was a far cry from where he stood just eight months ago. At Israel’s urging during its 12-day war with Iran last June, he agreed to deploy B-2 bombers to pummel three key Iranian nuclear sites – but drew a bright red line when Israelis presented his administration with a plan for killing Khamenei.The president peppered the supreme leader with thinly veiled threats back in June that he could have killed him if he wanted to. But he rejected the Israeli plan out of concern that it would destabilise the region.That caution was set aside on Saturday with Trump announcing Khamenei had been killed, while the Israeli military announced it had taken out Iran’s defence minister and the commander of its Revolutionary Guard. Iran’s state TV confirmed the supreme leader’s death on Sunday.Khamenei “was unable to avoid our Intelligence and Highly Sophisticated Tracking Systems and, working closely with Israel, there was not a thing he, or the other leaders that have been killed along with him, could do”, Trump said. “This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country.”