Trump wants to distract Americans from scandals at home with a diversionary war

Iran strikes are attempt to hijack the global narrative and drown out Epstein and tariffs with the thunder of cruise missiles

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As President Trump announced the opening strikes of a U.S.-led assault on Iran, he told the country’s soldiers to “lay down your weapons” and urged its people to “take over your government.”
 
“It will be yours to take,” the president said.
 
The message was rife with ambiguity. Mr. Trump left it unclear who Iranian soldiers were supposed to surrender to, and how Iranians might overthrow their rulers.
 
“It’s not like there are American soldiers there and they can put down their weapons right now,” said Philip H. Gordon, a senior foreign policy official in the Obama and Biden administrations. As for the president’s call for the Iranian people to overthrow their regime, Mr. Gordon said: “Which Iranian people? There’s 90 million of them.”
 
In past conflicts, the United States relied on federally funded media outlets to get its message, coupled with critical journalism, past enemy lines. It created Voice of America during World War II, and Radio Free Europe during the Cold War. The outlets lived on after the Berlin Wall fell, with local language offshoots targeting audiences across the Middle East, in former Soviet countries and elsewhere.
 
But many critics say that the Trump administration’s cuts to government-funded broadcasting have hurt the United States’ ability to reach the Iranian people — and win their trust — just as Washington is calling on them to rise up.
 
The Trump administration “has dismantled some of the most potent tools that it has” to get its message out, said Ilan Berman, an Iran expert at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington think tank.
 
“This de minimis approach is just not suited for the moment,” said Mr. Berman, who is also a member of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s board.
 
Last year, Mr. Trump wrote on social media that Voice of America was “a TOTAL, LEFTWING DISASTER,” and put nearly all of its 1,400 journalists and support staff on paid leave. He tried but failed to shutter Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, known as RFE/RL, an independent, U.S.-funded group whose outlets include the Persian-language Radio Farda.
 
Kari Lake, the Trump ally who now runs the parent entity overseeing government-funded media, reversed some of the cuts to Voice of America’s Persian service when Israel and the United States bombed Iran last June, according to news reports. But she continued to berate RFE/RL, asserting in January that its outlets had failed to “align their message with American foreign policy.”
 
RFE/RL had long broadcast into Iran via a U.S. radio facility in Kuwait, which allowed it to be heard in the country even when the government blocked internet access. It lost its ability to use that transmitter for several months last year amid the dispute with Ms. Lake, and its reach was still limited when Israel and the United States attacked Iran on Saturday.
 
“Farda was built for this moment,” Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, said in an interview on Saturday, as he and his staff scrambled to deal with disruptions to internet access and satellite distribution in Iran. “Our job is to empower the people of Iran by giving them access to timely, relevant information, and amplifying their voices.”
 
Mr. Capus said that on Saturday, Ms. Lake’s U.S. Agency for Global Media had agreed to carry Farda’s programming on the AM radio waves from the Kuwait transmitter at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s expense.
 
“We’re still working to effectively transmit our programming on any available means of distribution,” Mr. Capus said, calling Saturday’s agreement “a big first step.”
 
After Mr. Trump announced the strikes on Iran on Saturday, a Persian translation of his speech by Voice of America was quickly posted to the president’s account on Truth Social. Ms. Lake said in a statement that “V.O.A. Persian went live within hours of this morning’s operation, delivering President Trump’s message and real-time updates to the brave people of Iran through a variety of methods, including satellite.”
 
“What a glorious moment we are in the midst of,” Ms. Lake wrote on X.
 
On Voice of America’s Persian homepage, one headline paraphrased Mr. Trump’s message to Iranian soldiers: “Lay down your weapons or face certain death.”
 
Mr. Gordon said that the risk that the United States faces amid the muddled messaging is that seeking regime change without ground troops can create “even more of a security vacuum into which all sorts of different forces will surge.”
 
Mr. Gordon served as the assistant secretary of state for Europe when NATO waged an air war against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya in 2011, aiding a rebellion that eventually brought about the dictator’s death but threw the country into further chaos.
 
In Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, he said, the U.S. military sought to bring about regime change in different ways. But, he said, “all cases were similar in the sense that they turned into a costly disaster.”

Before the American and Israeli bombs started falling on Saturday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the authoritarian center of the theocratic regime for nearly 40 years, had planned for a transition of power in the event of his death.
 
Ayatollah Khamenei, 86, had led Iran since 1989, and held sweeping powers as the supreme leader. He was at once revered by followers as a representative of God and as the commander in chief of the armed forces, with the definitive word in all key state matters.
 
Ever since succeeding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founding father of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khamenei ruled with an iron fist and refused calls for change, crushing dissent and ordering the killing of protesters who challenged his rule in the street. Above all else, Ayatollah Khamenei viewed himself as the guardian of the revolution, responsible for safeguarding the survival of the Islamic republic, and had identified possible replacements to assume that role after him.
 
Now it appears that his plans will be put to the test.
 
The Iranian government said on Sunday that U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran had killed Ayatollah Khamenei, hours after President Trump had announced the supreme leader’s death. A short time later, the Iranian state news agency IRNA said that Iran’s president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist of the Guardian Council would be in charge during the transition period, without detailing what comes next.
 
Last June, during the 12-day war with Israel, when Ayatollah Khamenei was in hiding, he named three candidates who could be appointed swiftly to succeed him. The supreme leader must be a senior Shia cleric and scholar appointed by a committee of clerics known as the Assembly of Experts.
 
The three candidates Ayatollah Khamenei said he preferred for the role of supreme leader, based on interviews with six senior Iranian officials and two clerics who did not want to be identified discussing sensitive information, are the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i; Ayatollah Khamenei’s chief of staff, Ali Asghar Hejazi; and Hassan Khomeini, a moderate cleric from the reformist political faction who is a grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini.
 
The Israeli military said that Mr. Hejazi had been killed.
 
Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, who has been a powerful figure in the shadows, is favored by some factions, but Ayatollah Khamenei told followers that he did not want the post of supreme leader to be hereditary.
 
What happens now in Iran is unclear.
 
The nation’s divisions were on display by late Saturday. In some neighborhoods in Tehran, opponents of Ayatollah Khamenei were seen cheering, dancing and shouting in celebration of reports of his death, according to more than a dozen residents in the capital city, who were reached by phone and text messages.
 
“Can you hear the cheers and the clapping? Look, fireworks on my block,” said Ali, a businessman, in a video call from Iran.
 
Ahead of Saturday’s airstrikes, Ayatollah Khamenei took precautions to prepare the country and the regime for survival. He delegated the running of the country to one of his closest allies, the veteran politician Ali Larijani, who is the head of the National Security Council and has effectively sidelined President Masoud Pezeshkian.
 
“We will make the Zionist criminals and the dishonorable Americans regret it,” Mr. Larijani said on social media on Saturday. “The brave soldiers and the great nation of Iran will give the international tyrants who are going to hell an unforgettable lesson.”
 
Ayatollah Khamenei had also authorized a small circle of political and military allies to make decisions if he were to be killed or unreachable during a war, and named four layers of succession for senior military and political figures whom he personally appoints, according to six senior Iranian officials.
 
They include his chief of staff, Mr. Hejazi; Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of the Parliament and former commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corps; and his top military adviser and former commander in chief of the Guards, Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi.
 
It was unclear early Sunday who was in charge.
 
Days earlier, Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister of Iran, told Iranian media that in the event of a war with the United States, “we may have lost some of our leaders, but this is not a big problem.”
 
“We have no limit in defending ourselves,” he said.