Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
And on the 23rd day of war, Iran mocked the president of the United States using the tagline from The Apprentice. “Trump, you are fired,” Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a uniformed spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard, said into a camera on Sunday, the Iranian flag over his right shoulder. “Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he added for good measure, echoing Donald Trump’s favorite phrase.
Zolfaghari’s jabs were no isolated incident. Iran, it seems, is copying more than just Trump’s words. In some cases, its leaders have adopted the American president’s tactics, from maximalist negotiating demands to online mockery. In others, Iran seems to be moving proactively to counter Trump’s well-documented penchant to try to throw his opponents off-balance. According to Ali Ansari, a historian of Iran at the University of St Andrews, the Persian translation of Trump’s 1987 book The Art of the Deal has attracted a following inside the Islamic republic.* And while it’s difficult to assess whether every move Iran has made in this war is deliberately calculated to enrage, thwart, or manipulate Trump, each instance adds up to what looks like a concerted strategy based on a clear-eyed understanding of who Trump is.
In recent days, Iran has borrowed from Trump’s online insult-comic playbook in what seems like an effort to shape how the rest of the world sees the war. The X accounts of Iranian embassies have posted cartoons mocking Trump’s negotiating position, likened him to the hapless spike-collared bulldog in Looney Tunes, and even referenced the Epstein files. Iran’s official TV networks and allied social media accounts have aired A.I.-generated propaganda videos that show it winning the war, not unlike the White House’s TikTok-style hype reels featuring clips from movies and video games. In between footage of rockets striking Israel and Iranian citizens feting their embattled regime, Iranian news agencies have gotten in on the action, too. Fars news, which many in the U.S. consider to be state-affiliated media, has elevated criticisms of the war lodged by Trump’s domestic opponents, from Democratic senators to Trump’s former defense secretary, and tweeted polling that shows Americans’ support for the war slipping. Tehran may be thousands of miles from the U.S., but Iranian leaders seem well aware that their adversary is a deeply unpopular lame duck whose political base is under increasing strain. And if war is politics by another means, all politics is still local. This week, Fars covered the news that a Democratic candidate had flipped the legislative district that includes Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club.
Falling stocks and rising oil prices have become a political sore spot for Trump since the war began, and Iran’s leaders also seem to be on to his attempts to manipulate them. On Monday, Trump’s claim that the U.S. and Iran were having “very good and productive conversations” set off a market rally and sent oil prices plummeting. But borrowing a term from Trump’s information quiver, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, quickly labeled those claims “fake news.” Iran’s denials partially arrested stock markets’ recovery for the day. Here Iran is probably helped by Trump’s habit of lying, which makes it hard even for putative friends to take him at his word.
Elsewhere, Iran seems to be using Trump’s own tactics against him. “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward,” Trump—or, rather, his ghostwriter—explains in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” Faced with maximalist demands from Trump, Iran has responded in kind. The U.S. has sent Iran a 15-point ceasefire proposal that reportedly included provisions like ending uranium enrichment, placing limits on its missile arsenal, and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. All are points of leverage that Iran seems unlikely to willingly surrender right now (“Leverage is the biggest strength you have,” The Art of the Deal intones). In response, Iranian leaders reportedly demanded reparations for the war, control over the strait, and that the U.S. and Israel stop killing its leaders—conditions it probably understands Trump and his allies won’t accept, either.
Caginess and doublespeak are two other Trumpian classics. “Maximize your options,” he counsels in The Art of the Deal. So far, Iran seems to be following that advice. On Wednesday, after Iran publicly scoffed at the United States’ ceasefire proposal via state media, foreign minister Abbas Araghchi clarified that, actually, the country’s leaders were still reviewing it. Once they had, an unnamed senior Iranian official called the proposal “one-sided and unfair” to Reuters but stressed that a diplomatic “path forward may still be found.” Araghchi has said his country “has no intention to hold talks with the U.S.”—which is a long way from saying it won’t.
That seems to be what Trump is hoping. Late Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the president has told allies that he wants to end the war quickly, in part because it’s distracting from his other political goals. And at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, Steve Witkoff, Trump’s real-estate pal turned international negotiator, said he believed Iran was “looking for an off-ramp.” Yet Trump, who keeps insisting the war is proceeding “ahead of schedule” and that Iran is “begging to make a deal” to end it, has to be aware of the risks of seeming too eager to take one. “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it,” the future president warned in The Art of the Deal. No doubt aware that the president often seeks escape hatches from his own escalations, Iran boasted on Wednesday that it would “not allow Trump to determine the timing of the war’s end.” TACO, meet veto.
Of course, trolling Trump won’t necessarily translate to battlefield victories for Iran. The war has already sapped Iran’s missile reserves, decimated its navy, and killed several top leaders. Those who remain alive might well be bluffing, projecting resolve even if they would privately prefer to sue for peace. But at least for now, Iran’s approach appears to be keeping its foe in the White House guessing. “The Iranian negotiators are very different and ‘strange,’ ” Trump posted on Truth Social on Thursday. Looking in a mirror sometimes is.
Correction, March 26, 2026: This article originally referred to Iran as a kingdom. It is a theocratic republic.
