On Sunday, April 5, US President Donald Trump posted a post reminding Iran of a thrice-postponed deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face US attacks on civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges. Two days later, he escalated his threats, saying Iran’s “entire civilization will die tonight”, hours before abruptly announcing a two-week cease-fire.
As President Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, the deadline was “Tuesday, 8pm ET!”
On Sunday, April 5, US President Donald Trump posted a post reminding Iran of a thrice-postponed deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face US attacks on civilian infrastructure such as power plants and bridges. Two days later, he escalated his threats, saying Iran’s “entire civilization will die tonight”, hours before abruptly announcing a two-week cease-fire.
As President Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social on Sunday, the deadline was “Tuesday, 8pm ET!”
One unexpected response to the post came from the Iranian embassy in Zimbabwe’s X account. “8 p.m. is not so good. Could you change it to between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., and if possible, 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.? Thank you for drawing attention to this important issue. IEZ,” the embassy wrote, paraphrasing a phrase Trump often uses to approve his own posts in the last sentence.
It was a public diplomatic communication that would have probably been unthinkable six weeks ago, and a surprisingly ironic response from a country that had just faced a month of relentless bombing by the United States and Israel.
But various Iranian embassy accounts spent much of the war trolling President Trump and his administration with posts, photos and videos, some of which were generated by artificial intelligence.
In response to President Trump’s threat to take Iran “back to the Stone Age,” the Iranian embassy in Thailand posted: “Are we back to the Stone Age yet? We have been civilized for thousands of years.” The post featured an AI-generated photo depicting the US president as a caveman.
“Regime change has occurred successfully,” the Iranian embassy in South Africa wrote, referring to one of the many reasons President Trump launched the war against Iran, alongside a photo of U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth underlining several senior military officials recently fired.
Some might think these are parody accounts because none of them have the gray check mark that X often puts on official government accounts. However, an Iranian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed that all three accounts are genuine and belong to the embassy, adding: “They are posting to X voluntarily and independently.”
Immediately after the ceasefire was announced, the Iranian embassy in India (as seen officially on Twitter) posted an AI-generated image of President Trump kneeling in front of a sculpture of a knight waving the Iranian flag, with the caption: “We bow down to Iranian civilization.”
Even Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi indulged in so-called shitposting (albeit more diplomatically), writing on his X account that “no oil or gas was produced” in the Middle East during the Stone Age. “Are we convinced that the president and the Americans who put him in office want to turn back the clock?” he asked.
And then there’s the Lego video. The AI-generated video, created by a group called Explosive Media, depicts Mr. Trump, Mr. Hegseth, and the U.S. and Iranian troops as yellow figures from the popular toy brand. In one video, President Trump, while in bed, posts on Truth Social that Iran’s entire military fleet has been completely destroyed. An Iranian naval commander read the post and laughed. They then begin blowing up U.S. Navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz with mines, missiles, and drones, while President Trump, still in bed, begins to sweat, imagining the price of gas at the pump rising.
Other footage shows Trump increasingly panicked as U.S. military bases are attacked by Iranian missiles, traffic across the Strait is halted and world leaders refuse to help him. One of the most viral videos is set to a rap diss track that calls President Trump a “loser” and a “puppet” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There’s also another song that disses Hegseth.
The team behind the video insists it has no direct ties to the Iranian government, with one member describing it in an interview with the newspaper as “a student-led media team with a background in social activism.” new yorker. However, the video was shared by Iranian state media and attracted fans around the world on social media.
Iranian propaganda against the United States is neither a unique nor a new phenomenon. The Iranian regime and its proxies in the Middle East have spent decades and millions of dollars building a broadcasting and film production apparatus specialized in producing and disseminating propaganda both to its own people and to the region as a whole. The difference now is that its propaganda is accelerated by new technology and increasingly directed at Western and global audiences.
“This is clearly a departure from the standard operating procedure they have shown when it comes to disseminating propaganda,” said Philip Smith, an expert on Iranian proxies who tracks Shiite militia propaganda in the Middle East.
Smith said he was aware that many of the patterns shown in Iranian messaging throughout the war have long existed in Arabic-speaking countries and could be followed by Western analysts. “But the core of their message is an internalized one directed at the people of Iraq, for example,” he added. “Now it’s a little more targeted at American and European thinking about this issue. You can see there’s a little bit more effort being put into it.”
AI tools have helped fill that gap, allowing other U.S. adversaries such as Iran and China to create effective propaganda that resonates with Western audiences, even if the propagandists themselves don’t have a deep understanding of Western culture, Smith said. (Another viral propaganda video about the war, generated by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV and showing Americans as eagles and other birds of prey and Iranians as Persian cats, has since been widely translated, shared, and reported by mainstream media around the world.)
During the Iran war, Iran and China’s use of AI-powered social media ridicule occurred in a more permissive environment created by Trump himself. Gregory A. Daddis, a history professor at Texas A&M University, argued that during the war, the U.S. president’s ad hoc social media actions reached a new level, shattering wartime norms and broader norms of diplomatic communication, and setting a dangerous and violent standard. foreign policy The article was published a day after President Trump told Iran in a post on Truth Social: “Open the Straits, you crazy bastards, or you’ll live in hell.”
Dadis, who served in the U.S. Army for more than 20 years, said his communication style caters almost exclusively to President Trump’s domestic political base.
In a later interview, Dadis said, referring to a video released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that showed pro-Trump musicians and Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “The audience is fascinated by the sight of Kid Rock and Secretary Kennedy working out in a sauna room.” “That’s not a serious approach to foreign policy,” Dadis said. “The president continues to play to a very vile demographic that only sees this kind of chest-thumping as somehow patriotic.”
Other branches of the Trump administration have similarly adopted a frivolous AI-enabled social media strategy that has been around for a long time but is now being extended to the Iran war. One video posted by the White House Another piece uses AI to depict the Iranian regime as bowling pins that the U.S. military will defeat.
“We’re just eating up banger memes here,” said a senior White House official. politikoanother official boasted that the Iran war video had received “more than 3 billion impressions” online.
when asked foreign policy Regarding the intentions behind these videos and the administration’s response to the Iranian videos, White House Press Secretary Anna Kelly said, “While traditional media demands an apology from us for highlighting the extraordinary successes of the U.S. military, the White House will continue to present numerous examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of nuclear weapons being destroyed in real time.”
Daddis said Iran and China’s practice of posting nonsense – a strategy now also being used by some US allies such as France – could be seen as similar to what California Governor Gavin Newsom is doing domestically, “holding up a mirror” with Trump-style posts to show how ridiculous it is.
“It’s almost like, ‘Two people can play in that game,'” he added. “But again, all of this only diminishes what is needed most in these kinds of crisis situations: rational, adult, mature communication between governments. If we can’t engage rationally and maturely with the President of the United States, what’s left?”
read more
-
People hold portraits of slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei during a rally to commemorate his death in Tehran on April 9, 2026. People hold portraits of slain Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei during a rally to commemorate his death in Tehran on April 9, 2026. Iran ceasefire only divided the war
Far from ending the fighting, the current agreement does much to complicate it.
-
A man stands between two tractors, one green and one red, with shoulder-high tires. A sign spray-painted on the front of a red tractor reads “No Fuel, No Food.” The sky overhead is gray and you can see mid-rise buildings across the street. A man stands between two tractors, one green and one red, with shoulder-high tires. A sign spray-painted on the front of a red tractor reads “No Fuel, No Food.” The sky overhead is gray and you can see mid-rise buildings across the street. The energy crisis won’t end anytime soon (even if there’s a war with Iran)
Even if a ceasefire were reached, it would take months to undo the damage.
And even as the United States and Iran continue to press for a tenuous cease-fire agreement, with both sides declaring victory after a month of fighting, Iran appears to be at least holding its own, if not outright victory, in the virus war.
“What I found interesting is that we’re the only ones talking about the Lego video. They’re not talking about Iraq, they’re not talking about Bahrain, they’re not talking about Lebanon,” Smith said. “We’re the ones talking about it, which means they were successful.”
