Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in televised remarks on Friday that President Donald Trump would soon be “brought down” by his “arrogance,” even as massive protests against Khamenei and his brutal terrorist regime were raging across Iran.

“Trump should know that world tyrants such as Pharaoh, Nimrod, Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza were brought down at the peak of their arrogance. He too will be brought down,” Khamenei predicted.

“Everyone should know that the Islamic Republic came to power with the blood of hundreds of thousands of honorable people, and it will not back down in the face of saboteurs,” he declared even as anti-regime protests spread right across the country.

An infographic titled “Protests continue in Iran” created in Istanbul, Turkiye on January 9, 2026. (Efnan Ipsir/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Khamenei’s regime originally tried to mollify the protesters by listening to their concerns about the collapsing Iranian economy, but on Friday the ayatollah dismissed them all as wanton saboteurs and dupes of Israel and the United States.

“They want to make [Trump] happy. If he knew how to run a country, he would run his own,” the ayatollah grumbled.

Khamenei argued that the Iranian people should ignore Trump because “his hands are stained with the blood of Iranians” from the 12-Day War in June 2025, during which American bombers wiped out Iran’s uranium centrifuges at three key facilities, crippling its illegal nuclear weapons program.

The ayatollah concluded by telling young Iranians – the ones he was not planning to execute as saboteurs, anyway – to “keep your readiness and your unity,” because “a united nation will overcome any enemy.”

Khamenei continued his tirade on social media platform X, even as his regime was shutting down the Internet for all other Iranians.

“You can see how they’ve besieged a country in Latin America & taken some actions there. They aren’t even ashamed and explicitly state that this was for oil. For oil! They say they’ve done this for oil!” Khamenei shrieked – a somewhat amusing line, given that his regime is heavily dependent upon the illegal sales of its own oil, and even with petro-dollars rolling in, the mullahs have mismanaged the economy badly enough to send thousands of Iranians into the streets in protest.

In fact, the Iranian regime is anticipating a windfall from the fall of narco-terrorist Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, because Chinese refineries are reportedly planning to buy more crude from Iran to make up for lost Venezuelan supply.