‘Nobody knows who's running the country,’ says Trump as US asks Iran to cut enrichment

US President Donald Trump who has time and again claimed that Iran’s top rung has been taken out and its economy destroyed, voiced his confusion about who is running the country. Iran has, meanwhile, since the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that his son, Mojtaba Khamenei has been running the country from an undisclosed location.

"Their leaders are gone, their second group of leaders are gone, and the biggest problem ​I have is nobody knows who the hell is running ​the country," Trump said, even as Tehran insists that Washington knows who exactly its counterparts are.

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Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said in a news conference that the problem lies with Washington. "The problem is ​actually the opposite: it lies in the contradictory positions and mixed messaging from US officials," he said.

This comes after Trump rejected an Iranian proposal for a seven-day ceasefire. Iran said it would restore normal maritime traffic if Washington lifted its naval blockade on Iranian ports, waived oil export sanctions, and observed a ceasefire extending to Lebanon.

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Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance said Iran must make a ‘meaningful’ reduction to its nuclear enrichment capacity to satisfy US demands and end the war. "If you don't want a nuclear weapon, then why ​do you need 60% enriched fuel? And if you want to show commitment to not building a nuclear weapon, don't build highly enriched ⁠fuel. That's a very basic threshold issue…I think if they want to show a commitment to not building a nuclear weapon, they would do something meaningful on their ​enrichment capacity,” said Vance.

Vance, a skeptic of US involvement in foreign wars, has taken the lead in negotiating a settlement with Iran.