The United States launched airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend.
President Donald Trump and White House officials signaled that the administration is open to regime change, after the United States bombed the country’s nuclear facilities over the weekend.
In a statement on Truth Social, Trump suggested that Iran’s government, which has ruled the country as an Islamic theocratic autocracy since 1979, could be toppled in the midst of more than a week of airstrikes between Iran and Israel. The United States bombed multiple nuclear sites in an attempt to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon.
“It’s not politically correct to use the term, ‘Regime Change,’” Trump wrote on Sunday afternoon, “but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!”
On Monday morning, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told ABC News that “if the Iranian regime refuses to come to a peaceful, diplomatic solution—which the president is still interested in engaging in … why shouldn’t the Iranian people take away the power of this incredibly violent regime?”
“Our posture has not changed,” she said.
In reference to the president’s comment on Truth Social, Leavitt said that Trump “was just simply raising a question” and stressed that “as far as our military posture, it has not been changed.”
Neither Trump nor Leavitt suggested an ouster of the Islamic regime, led by Ali Khamenei, and nor did he say that the United States should play a role in overthrowing it.
Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signaled Sunday that the Trump administration isn’t interested in removing the current regime, but is interested in dismantling its nuclear facilities to prevent the regime from acquiring nuclear weapons.
“We don’t want to achieve regime change. We want to achieve the end of the Iranian nuclear program,” Vance told ABC News in an interview Sunday. “That’s what the president set us out to do.”
Rubio, speaking to CBS News on Sunday, said that the airstrikes were not “an attack on Iran” and “not an attack on the Iranian people,” adding that “this wasn’t a regime change move.”
