Iranian officials are trolling President Trump while the United States and Israel wage war on their country, taking a page from his playbook and mocking him in the language of the extremely online, with jabs and memes.
“Hey Trump. You are fired!” said Ebrahim Zolfaghari, spokesman of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, ending a video on Sunday that was otherwise in Persian with Mr. Trump’s old television catch phrase from The Apprentice.
“You are familiar with this sentence,” he told the president, before concluding with Mr. Trump’s now famous social media sign-off. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Iranian officials are not the only trolls — American and Israeli ones do it too. But the online sparring comes as much of Iran’s population of more than 90 million people weathers intensifying bombardment while under a nearly monthlong, state-imposed internet blackout.
And the messages, even when ostensibly directed at the Iranian people, show a surprisingly sophisticated familiarity with American culture, weaponized to taunt and mock Mr. Trump and his policies.
The Israelis, for their part, have run an intense multilingual messaging operation, including sending the Iranian people a flurry of bombardment notices, calls to take back their country and sinister jokes, which they mostly cannot see.
For Nowruz, the Persian new year, the Israeli foreign ministry’s Persian-language X account posted an image of a Wack-a-Mole game, with the face of Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, popping out of one of the holes. The caption: “A game for the Nowruz holidays.”
And the Trump administration is active on social media, posting videos that serve as war sizzle reels, claiming victory and decimation, which seem as much designed to rally its base as to incense Tehran.
Iran’s messaging, meanwhile, is “clearly not for an Iranian audience,” said Ben Ditto, who has spent a decade tracking online information warfare across conflicts. References to American products and cultural touchstones are deliberate. “They’re using the language that Westerners will understand because it’s for a Western audience,” he said.
Tehran Speaks Your Language
Brig. Gen. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former Guards commander and the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, has been a key figure overseeing the war. He is also active on social media, fighting in the messaging battles.
As fluctuating oil prices drove record sums into oil-linked funds, and oil traders made hundreds of millions of dollars in suspiciously timed transactions, Mr. Ghalibaf responded.
On Monday, he refuted Mr. Trump’s assertion that Iran was talking about a truce, using one of the president’s favorite phrases for attacking the media, posting, “Fake news is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the U.S. and Israel are trapped.”
The following day, he pointed to rumors of market manipulation linked to Mr. Trump’s announcements, referring to a “jawboning campaign” to move “the paper oil market,” joking, “But let’s see if they can turn that into ‘actual fuel’ at the pump — or maybe even print gas molecules!”
When Energy Secretary Chris Wright mistakenly said the U.S. Navy had escorted an oil tanker through the Strait of Hormuz earlier this month, Mr. Ghalibaf joked, “Maybe on PlayStation!”
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, joined the fray on Thursday, posting lines from the movie War Machine, a Netflix satire of American military hubris in Afghanistan, in which a general’s aide is instructed, “You’re not here to win. You’re here to clean up the mess. Get your PowerPoint presentation in order. Show us how all the graphs are suddenly pointing in the right direction.”
Iran’s Embassy in South Africa this week mocked Mr. Trump’s claims he will share control of the Strait of Hormuz with the supreme leader. Posting an image of a car with two steering wheels — one regular, the other with googly eyes reminiscent of a child’s toy — the embassy wrote, “The Strait of Hormuz will be controlled by me and the Ayatollah,” punctuated with smiling emojis.
“Justice the American Way”
The Trump administration famously embraces internet culture, and its war posts include a dizzying mix of American pop music, Hollywood movies, cartoons, games and military footage — blending fact and fiction, bombings and SpongeBob SquarePants, in an effort to convey power and generate excitement.
The posts have drawn tens of millions of views — and criticism from veterans, lawmakers and some whose work was used without their approval. The White House earlier this month posted a video with the message “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY” splicing superhero, action and war movies with actual visuals of attacks. It has drawn more than 68 million views on X.
The actor Ben Stiller, who co-wrote, directed and starred in Tropic Thunder, which mocks war films, protested its use in the video, saying, “War is not a movie.”
The administration speaks the language it knows and loves — not that of Iran. Unlike Iran’s officials, the American government has difficulty reaching most Iranians and little apparent interest in doing so, despite Mr. Trump’s occasional urging of Iranians to rise up against their government.
Noting the way Iran restricts its internet and Americans mass export their culture, selling the world on their country, James J.F. Forest, director of security studies at the University of Lowell at Massachusetts, said Iranians have something of an advantage. The United States is “an open book,” he said.
Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering breaking news around the world. She is based in Washington.
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