As President Donald Trump continues to threaten to attack Iran should it harm protesters, its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, issued a grave prediction Friday that Trump’s downfall was fast approaching.
Sparked by an ongoing economic crisis, demonstrations have erupted across Iran, and in turn, Khamenei has vowed to crack down on protesters he accused of working on behalf of Trump, whose administration has long sought to topple Iran’s government. Trump made an explicit threat Thursday that his administration would “hit them very hard” should Iran harm any protesters, bragging that the United States was “ready to do it.”
Khamenei took to social media on Friday, however, to attack Trump for his open threats, and offered a bleak prediction for the president’s immediate future.
“The U.S. President who judges arrogantly about the whole world should know that tyrants & arrogant rulers of the world, such as Pharaoh, Nimrod, Mohammad Reza [Pahlavi] & other such rulers saw their downfall when they were at the peak of their hubris,” Khamenei wrote in a social media post on X. “He too will fall.”
Khamenei has frequently taken sharp jabs at Trump over social media, having taunted him last October over what he characterized as Trump’s premature celebration that the United States had destroyed Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Khamenei also mocked Trump in November for his failure to end the war in Ukraine, something Trump said he would end within “24 hours” of being elected.
Later on Friday, Khamenei took another dig at Trump over his threats to Iran, and urged him to focus more on managing “his own country.”
“The US President has said that if the Iranian govt. does such-and-such, I’ll take the side of the rioters,” Khamenei wrote in a social media post on X. “The rioters have put their hopes in him. If he’s so capable, he should manage his own country.”
Iran’s supreme leader has also demonstrated an odd tendency to offer advice on love and marriage on social media, with a number of his older social media posts going viral last summer that show him declaring women to be “stronger than men,” and condemning violence against women.
