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Influence: Iranians engage wartime social media taunt on Trump
Traditional diplomacy has been replaced by "digital missiles" as Iranian embassies worldwide use American-built social media platforms to lampoon US President Donald Trump.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was not normally known for taunting enemies on social media.
But wartime brought with it courage the Iranian embassies are now using to attack enemy America.
It all began some days into the Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion, the raids by American and Israeli forces on Iran on February 28. Now Iran has been fighting back in many ways, including aerially and online.
This week, the two sides agreed on a two-week ceasefire, which was already looking shaky following violations.
And embassies faraway from Tehran were doing the Lord’s work of taunting enemy, using American-built social media. Daring verbal missiles posted on X by Iran’s embassies abroad have become both a source of humour and banter.
Using their official handles, the consulates posted numerous stinging remarks, and these ones – unlike some of their long-range projectiles fired in the course of the war – could not be intercepted.
Iranian embassies in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Turkiye, Tajikistan, and the UK, among others, showed little respect to the US and its superpower status, downplaying the damage caused in the Asian country and playing up the flaws in their opponents.
US President Donald Trump arrives for a "Keep America Great" campaign rally at Huntington Center in Toledo, Ohio, on January 9, 2020. Few could miss Trump’s overall policy incoherence vis-à-vis Iran. PHOTO | SAUL LOEB | AFP
When US president Donald Trump announced on April 8 that the two countries had reached a ceasefire, despite his much-publicised earlier threat that a whole civilisation would be wiped out, the Iranian embassy in Senegal responded with a jibe.
It uploaded an AI-generated image of a man waving a white flag while buried inside the debris of felled and burnt warplanes emblazoned “US Air Force”. An F-16, F-35 and A-10 were among the wrecked planes. The man’s face was buried in the debris and his hair was styled to look like Mr Trump’s.
The caption read: “After weeks of escalation, the United States has suspended its attacks against Iran and accepted a two-week ceasefire, partly based on a 10-point Iranian proposal that will serve as a basis for future negotiations. Congratulations to the great Iranian nation for this progress.”
The defiant stand was a continuation of what other embassies had been doing in the course of the war that began on February 28.
Ridicule of the US fighter jets downed in Iran led to a number of jibes.
On April 3, the Iranian embassy in Nigeria posted an AI image of a wrecked aeroplane walking like a human on two feet but struggling to move due to severe injuries. The caption read: “This wasn’t an F-35… it was American pride that crashed. Read it as: ‘Oooof 35.’”
The Iranian embassy in Kenya also had something to say about the reported shooting down of American fighter jets in Iranian airspace. An April 7 post satirically suggested that they would be sold as scrap metal.
“In Iran, there is a job known as ‘we buy scrap iron’. In this line of work, the buyer roams the streets to purchase scrap metal at the highest price. According to estimates provided by experts, the minimum value of three helicopters and two airplanes amounts to over $250 million,” it posted along photos of crashed aeroplanes.
The messages also attempted to show that Mr Trump is not as powerful as he might think he is. On April 6, after the US commander-in-chief threatened a major attack at 8pm Eastern Time (ET), the Iranian embassy in Zimbabwe wrote back to ask: “8pm is not that good. Could you change it to between 1 and 2pm, or if possible, 1 and 2am?”
A map showing the Strait of Hormuz and Iran is seen behind a 3D printed miniature of US President Donald Trump in this illustration taken June 22, 2025.
Earlier, on April 5, when Mr Trump had demanded the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, the same embassy joked: “We’ve lost the keys.” Its counterpart in Zimbabwe furthered the lampooning by posting: “Shh…the key is under the flowerpot. Just open for friends.”
That wasn’t all. On April 4, the Zimbabwean embassy’s handle had chided the US president with: “Trump, please talk. We are bored.” This was in reference to the many briefings and posts that Mr Trump had done about the war.
April 6 witnessed some more ridicule toward Mr Trump from the Iranian embassy in Tajikistan, which posted a meme of an overweight person hiding behind a pole that is hardly a tenth of his width. It labelled the overweight person “Epstein files” and the pole “Iran war”. The caption said: “I am trying to hide myself. Thank you. Donald J. Trump.”
This was in reference to some observers’ notion that Mr Trump joined the war as a distraction from the revelations that had come from the recently released files detailing the communications of deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mr Trump, among other influential figures, had been mentioned in it.
On April 9, as the world grappled with whether the ceasefire of the previous day would hold, the South African embassy was still sending barrages Mr Trump’s way.
“Instead of MAGA [Make America Great Again], Trump followed MIG (Make Israel Great), that also failed,” it posted.
Back to the Strait of Hormuz, a key global shipping route, the area was a subject of a stinging graphic by the Iranian embassy in Nigeria, which depicted a trap featuring a drum of oil floating on the strait and a string-controlled lid lurking over the drum. The lid took the shape of a coffin and was painted in the colours of the US flag, implying that the powers to trap whoever tried passing there were controlled by Iran and that the US was a mere accessory.
The coffin rhetoric also appeared in a March 30 post by the Iranian embassy in the UK. Responding to reports of deployment of ground troops to the Persian country, it wrote: “No problem, the US coffin industry is about to have a golden age! Make American Coffin Industry Great Again (#MACIGA).”
The Strait of Hormuz was the subject of an April 4 graphic by the US embassy in Bulgaria, which depicted Mr Trump as a person attempting to cross the area but his neck had got stuck in the strait, making him shout: “I can’t breathe!”
Another remark that incensed the embassies is Mr Trump’s repeated threat that the US-Israel attacks would send Iran to the Stone Age. The Iranian embassy in South Africa pushed back heavily, and on April 2 it responded to a post by US Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth about the sentiment.
“Stone Age? At a time when you were still in caves searching for fire, we were inscribing human rights on the Cyrus Cylinder. We endured the storm of Alexander and the Mongol invasions and remained; because Iran is not just a country, it is a civilisation,” the embassy wrote.
If the trend is anything to go by, the verbal missiles will keep coming from every handle and every corner.
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