Trump Tells G7 You’re Welcome, and Someone’s Missing While Tehran Rocks

Is Iran on the verge of surrender? Does anyone in Iran still have the authority to capitulate? Today ends the second week of the war on Iran, a conflict in which the Iranian navy has been destroyed, the regime’s ballistic missile capacity nearly gone, and even its control over traffic on the Strait of Hormuz is tested and about to fail. The regime still sounds defiant, but the one-sided destruction of Iran and its attacks on neighbors put the regime in an impossible position, even for bargaining. 

Donald Trump made sure to pass those assessments to the G7 leaders in a conference call on Wednesday, along with a very clear message – You’re welcome. Trump predicted an Iranian surrender in the near future just hours before Iran released a statement from its purported new leader that promised to continue the fight, Axios reports this morning, but that likely wouldn’t have changed Trump’s assessment anyway:

President Trump told G7 leaders in a virtual meeting Wednesday that Iran is “about to surrender,” according to three officials from G7 countries briefed on the contents of the call.

Behind the scenes: Trump boasted about the results of Operation Epic Fury on the G7 call Wednesday morning, telling allies, “I got rid of a cancer that was threatening us all.”

• While claiming Iran was about to surrender, he also suggested there were no officials left alive in Tehran with the power to make that decision.
• “Nobody knows who is the leader, so there is no one that can announce surrender,” Trump said, according to two officials briefed on the call.

About that message: no one knows who wrote it, and it’s not likely to be the alleged Supreme Leader. Mojtaba Khamenei’s mail-in message from the great beyond also came two days after the regime conducted an “allegiance ceremony” in Tehran to the Nepo Babytollah. Or rather, a ceremony in which Tehranis pledged allegiance to a cardboard cutout of Khamenei Jr. Officials used an amateurish mock-up and mockery in which a bad picture of Khamenei’s face was stuck onto a disproportional and undecorated generic cardboard “body.” 

The day after Mojtaba’s message got read aloud by a female TV presenter, the regime attempted to offer proof of life for Nepo Babytollah by distributing images of Khamenei in public. However, that story fell apart quickly when it became apparent that the Iranians had to use AI to bring Mojtaba to life:

Iran is using AI-altered pictures of new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei — amid reports that the successor is too injured to make any public appearance.

A probe of the latest photos published by Iran state-media and on Khamenei’s new X account reveal that they have been edited using online AI tools, said Shayan Sardarizadeh, the Senior journalist at BBC Verify. 

“Google’s SynthID finds watermarks in it that indicate it has been edited using Google AI,” Sardarizadeh wrote on X.

The fake photos appeared to be manipulated from years-old photos of Khamenei attending a pro-government rally, the verification expert added.

In other words, Trump has no reason to consider Khamenei’s statement as any indicator of the strength of the regime. The regime itself seems panicked about the lack of a genuine theocratic imprimatur, given the desperate attempts to use hereditary succession and wrap itself in the authority of Khamenei. That indicates a fragility within the military junta that’s actually running the regime at the moment, a sign that they fear a loss of control without having a Weekend At Bernie’s mullah up front, and not willing to risk the election of a live mullah instead that might seize power back from Iran’s military-industrial complex.

More evidence emerged this morning that Mojtaba may be just a media myth rather than a live leader. Tehran held its annual Quds Day march, its annual triumphalist tradition of claiming Jerusalem for the Muslims, in which several surviving regime figures appeared in public, most for the first time. Guess who didn’t come to the parade, however? Oh, let’s not always see the same hands …

Images released by Iranian state media showed several senior officials attending Quds Day rallies in Tehran on Friday.

Those seen in the footage included Atomic Energy Organization chief Mohammad Eslami, Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, police commander… pic.twitter.com/obhFNoJYVS

— Iran International English (@IranIntl_En) March 13, 2026

Those seen in the footage included Atomic Energy Organization chief Mohammad Eslami, Supreme National Security Council secretary Ali Larijani, police commander Ahmad-Reza Radan and Armed Forces Judicial Organization head Ahmadreza Pourkhaghan.

Masoud Pezeshkian, the president that the IRGC publicly sidelined this week, also made an appearance on the streets, although he seemed far away from the festivities in this clip:

Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, participated in the Quds Day event in Tehran. pic.twitter.com/BtBOvIQzjr

— Kurdistan 24 English (@K24English) March 13, 2026

Mojtaba didn’t show up at all, however. It doesn’t appear that the regime even bothered to bring the Cardboard Cut-Out Mullah along for the march. The Jerusalem Post reports that Abbas Aragchi has returned from Geneva and made his presence known publicly, while also noting that an explosio rattled the crowd but apparently did no damage to it. 

The message is clear: Mojtaba is either dead or incapacitated. Either status suits the IRGC, which can then claim to act in his name no matter what they do, and that effectively sidelines the rest of the mullahs. That means there won’t be anyone to effectively negotiate or capitulate, as Trump suggested. But it also means that the same leadership that led Iran into this box canyon will be making the rest of the decisions, and that’s bad news for a regime that is likely one big Tehran march away from the dustbin of history. 

Editor’s Note: For decades, former presidents have been all talk and no action. Now, Donald Trump is eliminating the threat from Iran once and for all.

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