The most-liked Persian-language tweet of all time comes from an unlikely source.
The winner is not Ayatollah Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s octogenarian Supreme Leader who has become a regular poster on X of virulently anti-Israel, antisemitic and anti-Western content.
The unlikely winner, in fact, is closer to home.
On January 11, 2020, former President Donald Trump tweeted in Farsi his condolences to the “brave and suffering people of Iran” after regime forces shot down Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752 minutes after taking off from Tehran’s airport, killing all 176 people onboard.
The fateful flight, carrying mostly Iranian, Canadian and Ukrainian passengers, took place just hours after Iran launched a ballistic missile attack on Iraqi bases housing American soldiers.
Iranian authorities would later concede that the commercial airliner was misidentified as a cruise missile.
At the time of Trump’s tweet, which garnered more than 277,000 likes, Iranians had flooded the streets of Iran to protest the regime’s targeting of a commercial airliner and called for the ousting of Khamenei.
“I have stood with you since the beginning of my presidency and my government will continue to stand with you,” Trump pledged to the Iranian people.
Since then, scores of Iranian-Americans have returned the favor, praising Trump for understanding the plight of ordinary Iranians and for his aggressive stance toward Tehran’s clerical leaders.
Four years on and with the US presidential election less than two months away, a new Iranian-American movement launched in early September to help bring Trump back to the White House.
به مردم شجاع و رنج کشیده ایران: من از ابتدای دوره ریاست جمهوریم با شما ایستادهام و دولت من همچنان با شما خواهد ایستاد. ما اعتراضات شما را از نزدیک دنبال می کنیم. شجاعت شما الهام بخش است.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2020
The movement, Iranians for Trump came about because “there was no established coalition to represent the voices of the Iranian diaspora,” Sarah Raviani, co-founder and English-language spokesperson of the movement, told The Post.
Raviani added that most Iranians who had fled from their native Iran around the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and settled in the US were mostly either politically inactive, registered Democrats or independents, but Trump’s first term drew many to the GOP.
“We support President Trump because he holds the Iranian regime accountable,” Raviani said, adding that the aggressive ‘maximum pressure’ Iran policy President Trump adopted in his first term helped keep the regime at bay.
Trump’s Iran policy involved imposing debilitating sanctions on the regime and designating the country’s armed force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a terrorist organization.
In January 2020, Trump also ordered a drone strike killing Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was seen as the second-most powerful person in Iran after the ayatollah and had been in charge of the regime’s tactical weapons and intelligence support to regional proxy allies, including Hezbollah and Hamas.
One pro-Trump member, Farnaz Murcray, said she supports Trump because he is the only presidential candidate who can guarantee her family’s safety.
“I joined Iranians for Trump because, as a mother, I want an America that is safe, peaceful and prosperous,” Murcray, a real estate agent in northern California who left Iran when she was 10, told The Post.
The Democratic Party, Murcray added, has acquiesced to the Islamic regime with its continuous “appeasement policies of sanction relief and releasing billions of dollars that go on to fund terrorism around the globe.”
For Nasim Behrouz, co-founder and Persian-language spokesperson for Iranians for Trump —which is not formally part of the Trump campaign — the Biden administration’s Iran policy has failed spectacularly.
“President Biden and Vice President Harris don’t understand the regime in Iran,” said Behrouz, who was born and raised in Iran, noting that the two previous Democratic administrations sought to open channels of communication with Iran in the naive expectation of behavioral change by the regime. “We’ve seen very weak leadership over the last four years – weak leadership and appeasement that ended up only enriching the regime.”
Findings from the National Union for Democracy in Iran, a D.C.-based non-profit, suggests that aggression – not restraint – is the only language the Islamic Republic understands.
Unlike in Trump’s first term, executions in Iran, the regime’s military spending and its nuclear weapons advancement program all accelerated significantly during the Obama and Biden administrations.
In 2023, executions in Iran soared to 838, the highest number in almost a decade, and up from 576 the year prior.
Behrouz noted that she and other like-minded Iranians were drawn to Trump’s fighting attitude toward “destructive ideologies, including radical Islamic and far-left ideologies.”
“I saw what happened to my country, Iran, 45 years ago [with the Islamic Revolution] and see the same dangers coming to Western countries,” she said.
Looking ahead to the November 5 presidential elections, Raviani fears that a Harris White House would involve more damaging concessions to Tehran.
“The people advising Harris built their careers around a failed Iran policy,” she said. “Philip Gordon, Harris’s national security advisor, wants to continue negotiating with the regime. He said regime change isn’t a viable option and that we should instead ‘contain’ the regime. That is appeasement.”
A Trump return to the White House would likely see a resumption of harsher sanctions imposed on Tehran – a reality the regime appears to be actively avoiding.
That may explain why Tehran hacked the Trump campaign in early August.
A month before that, US authorities caught wind of a plot by Iran to assassinate Trump.
Jonathan Harounoff is the author of the forthcoming book “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt.”
