‘We might have gone too far’ in killing Iran’s leaders, we ‘don’t know who the hell we’re dealing with,’ Trump quips

US President Donald Trump quips at a campaign rally that the US “might have gone too far” in its campaign to assassinate Iran’s leaders during the war, because now the US doesn’t “know who the hell we’re dealing with.”

Trump made the apparently off-the-cuff remarks at a campaign rally in Ohio yesterday evening. He seemed to be speaking in a lighthearted manner and was smiling.

“They got no ships, they got no nothing, they got no leaders, even, that’s the problem,” Trump said. “We might have gone too far with the leaders because we don’t know who the hell we’re dealing with.”

Trump on Iran:

We might have gone too far with the leaders because we don't know who the hell we're dealing with anymore.

We're having a hard time figuring out who the hell to deal with, to be honest with you. I think we went too far.

We could have stopped at level one. Level… pic.twitter.com/So3NMfViQm

— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 13, 2026

Trump has made similar comments in the past.

“Nobody wants to be the president of Iran,” he says, appearing to mix up the Islamic Republic’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, who is alive and in office, with the country’s late supreme leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed in the war’s opening strikes on February 28. Khamenei’s son and successor, Mojtaba, was injured in that strike and has not been seen in public since.

“They have roll calls: ‘Who would like to be the president?’ Nobody. ‘I don’t want it,'” he says, mimicking such a scenario.