(SeaPRwire) –   Nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump campaigned against what he called his Democratic rival’s “failed policy of nation building and regime change.” Following his 2016 election victory, he pledged to “stop rushing to topple foreign regimes.”

Now, he is boasting about having carried out that very policy.

Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday, the President said his administration is holding “very good” negotiations with Iran to end the war, though he raised concerns that the Middle Eastern nation’s unpredictability could hinder any potential agreement. 

“We’ve had regime change,” Trump stated. “If you look already because the one regime was decimated, destroyed. They’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead. And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before. It’s a whole different group of people. So I would consider that regime change.” 

In joint strikes conducted with Israel, the U.S. killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, head of the country’s conservative theocratic regime established after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Khamenei was succeeded by his son Mojtaba, whom Trump has criticized as “unacceptable.”

Several other Iranian leaders have also been killed since the war began. Those killed include Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, and Gholamreza Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Basij force — a plainclothes militia unit of the highly influential Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Other casualties are Iranian Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh, IRGC commander Mohammad Pakpour, IRGC navy commander Alireza Tangsiri, and Iran Defense Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani.

However, key top officials remain alive, including President Masoud Pezeshkian, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is said to be in talks with Iran’s Parliament speaker Mohammed-Baqer Qalibaf, and is reportedly considering him as a potential U.S.-backed leader for Iran. Qalibaf has denied holding direct negotiations with the Trump administration, while Pakistan officially serves as the intermediary between the U.S. and Iran. Trump claimed the Iranian representatives Washington is currently engaging with are “very reasonable” and that “you can’t do much better than that.”

But the changes in Tehran’s leadership ranks do not count as regime change, Danny Citrinowicz, senior researcher for the Iran and the Shi’ite Axis Program at the Tel Aviv-based Institute for National Security Studies, posted on X. Instead, he said, what is occurring is “a transformation within the regime itself, one that has made it more extreme.”

‘Not politically correct’

Trump has apparently grown receptive to the idea of regime change that he once promised to oppose. Earlier this year, his administration intervened in Venezuela to arrest the country’s sitting leader. And last year, Trump signaled the current military campaign when he warned that the “not politically correct” term might be necessary for Iran, even as administration officials including Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio insisted “we don’t want a regime change” and “we’re not into the regime change business here.” 

Trump later backed away from his own suggestion, saying that June that regime change “takes chaos, and ideally, we don’t want to see so much chaos.”

However, as tensions between the U.S. and Iran rose in the lead-up to the current war, on Feb. 13, Trump said a shift in Iran’s power structure “would be the best thing that could happen.” Still, in the initial days after the war broke out on Feb. 28, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the operation is “not a so-called regime change war.”

Now, as negotiations to end the war — which is unpopular with most Americans — continue, Trump appears to have stretched the definition of regime change to claim he has delivered on it, with reports noting he told CNBC last week that the term is an accurate description of what the U.S. has already achieved in Iran.