U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, slammed President Donald Trump‘s handling of the U.S. military strikes against Iran, including the killing of the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei.
Auchincloss wrote on social media: “Donald Trump has replaced an 86-year-old terrorist dictator with a 56-year-old terrorist dictator. Mojtaba Khamenei is a radical Shia Islamist who is committed to hard-line clerical rule at home and to exporting the Islamic Revolution abroad. He has deep, decades-long ties to the IRGC & Basij. He is personally implicated in the torture and murder of tens of thousands of Iranians; and has directed the repression of millions more.
“The younger Khamenei has less popular legitimacy and is more beholden to extremists than even his father. Weak and insecure at home and abroad, the new Supreme Leader is likely to escalate proxy attacks and race for nuclear capability.”
Auchincloss added, “Mr. President, wtf is your plan?”
Donald Trump has replaced an 86-year-old terrorist dictator with a 56-year-old terrorist dictator. Mojtaba Khamenei is a radical Shia Islamist who is committed to hard-line clerical rule at home and to exporting the Islamic Revolution abroad. He has deep, decades-long ties to the…
— Rep. Jake Auchincloss
(@RepAuchincloss) March 8, 2026
The MAGA-aligned X account “amuse” — refuting Auchincloss’s assertion that Trump personally or literally “replaced” one dictator with another — responded to the Congressman’s claim by asking the AI app Grok to “confirm there is no evidence that Trump was involved in the decision to appoint Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader of Iran.”
[NOTE: Auchincloss’s statement considers the effective results of Trump’s decapitation of Iranian leadership, including Ali Khamenei, which resulted in the replacement of one dictator with another. He blames Trump for facilitating this change. Trump said earlier this week that he should have a say in who is chosen to lead Iran, and that Khamenei’s son was “unacceptable.”]
Grok replied: “No evidence exists that President Trump was involved in Iran’s Assembly of Experts decision to appoint Mojtaba Khamenei as Supreme Leader on March 8. It was an internal Iranian process after Ali Khamenei’s death in U.S.-Israeli strikes.” Grok also echoed the news above, saying that “Trump publicly called the choice ‘unacceptable’ and said he wanted input, but the clerics proceeded.”
Other MAGA influencers are chiming in, claiming alternately that Mojtaba Khamenei “won’t be the leader of Iran,” and that “he’ll be gone soon enough.”
On Monday the New York Times showed video from Tehran and reported that “a crowd gathered at Enghelab Square in Tehran to celebrate the announcement of Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the recently killed supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as his father’s successor.” Most American political observers, Republican and Democrat, agreed with the view expressed in the Times headline reading: Iran’s Choice of Leader Signals Defiance.
Administration figures including Trump himself have offered various and sometimes shifting goals for the attack on Iran, including regime change and nuclear capability prevention, making the U.S. plan and endgame ambiguous and possibly fluid. Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, without saying exactly what the plan is, assured Americans that the operation is “very much on track, on plan.”