The President says Iran's next supreme leader will need approval from him.

Hon. Pull up a stool. The President of the United States, on Tuesday, on a phone interview with ABC News, told the reporter, on the record, that the next supreme leader of Iran is going to need his approval before taking the job.

That is what he said. Quote. He’s going to have to get approval from us. If he doesn’t get approval from us, he’s not going to last long.

Hon. Iran has eighty-five million people. Iran is one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Iran has its own clerical hierarchy and its own constitution and its own Assembly of Experts, which is the body that selects the supreme leader. The Assembly of Experts has eighty-eight members. The eighty-eight members are all clerics. The eighty-eight members do not, in any volume of Iranian law I have ever read about at the Greyhound counter, report to the President of the United States.

What the President is saying, hon, is that Iran is like a county fair and that he is the guy who hands out the blue ribbon. What the President is also saying, hon, is that the Assembly of Experts in Tehran is waiting on a phone call from Mar-a-Lago. What the President is also saying, hon, in the same interview, is that we don’t seek regime change in Iran.

You ever notice how the people who say they don’t seek regime change keep demanding approval over the regime?

The interview ran for fourteen minutes. The President also said, in the same fourteen minutes, that everything is on the table regarding sending special forces into Iran to seize the enriched uranium. He also said the war is going very well. He also said the war is almost over. He also said the war has only begun.

The Iranian Assembly of Experts, four days later, is going to elect Mojtaba Khamenei. The fifty-six-year-old son of the late supreme leader, the one we killed in the opening hours of the war. Mojtaba is, by all available reporting, the candidate the clerical establishment settled on without making a single phone call to Washington. The President will say, on the day of the announcement, that he is not happy. He will say Mojtaba is going to have problems. He will say it from a podium in Florida.

Mojtaba, last anybody checked, is still the supreme leader.

The thing about running a diner, hon, is that you learn fast that the guy at the counter who says he is in charge of who gets seated is almost never the owner of the restaurant. The owner, hon, is in the back. The guy at the counter is the guy at the counter. In this metaphor, the Iranian Assembly of Experts is the owner and the President of the United States, on Tuesday, on the phone with ABC, is the guy at the counter.

The Assembly of Experts, hon, did not call. The Assembly of Experts is not going to call.

Funny how that works.