The Iranian rial plummeted to an all-time low on Wednesday after Donald Trump secured reelection to the White House, signaling apprehension from the terrorist-supporting regime and a loss of confidence among its supporters.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which the first Trump administration designated a terrorist group, responded to Trump’s return with a social media video threatening to kill him.
The IRGC, a designated terrorist organization and the theocratically controlled wing of Iran’s military, made its feelings on the 2024 U.S. presidential election clear by promising to “finish the job” and murder Trump to avenge IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Trump ordered the liquidation of Soleimani in a January 2020 air strike while the Iranian general was coordinating terrorist attacks against Americans in Iraq. The Iranian regime declared Soleimani a “martyr” and insisted its subjects celebrate him as a national hero, although quite a few of them resisted that command.
The IRGC video, published on Wednesday through one of its channels on the messaging platform Telegram, included footage of a bloodied Trump after the failed July assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. The IRGC promised to finish what the Pennsylvania shooter started:
The soundtrack to the video includes audio from a speech Soleimani gave in July 2018, in which he said, “Oh Mr. Trump, the gambler! I tell you that the Quds Forces is your opponent. There is no night that passes where we sleep and don’t think about you!”
The Quds Force is the division of the IRGC that Soleimani commanded. Its mission is to foment unrest and sponsor terrorism across the Middle East, destabilizing governments the Iranians regard as adversaries.
Wednesday’s video was not the first time various wings of the Iranian regime have threatened to avenge Soleimani by killing Trump. Iran “indicted” Trump and members of his administration for killing Soleimani in late 2020. In January 2022, former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi threatened to take revenge against Trump if the international community did not put him on trial. In December 2023, an Iranian court ordered the United States to pay $50 billion in damages for Soleimani’s death.
The U.S. intelligence community said last month that Iran’s threats are serious, and President Joe Biden publicly warned Iran not to act on them. Trump himself has said Iran had plans that “didn’t work out,” but “they will try again.”
Iran’s currency, the rial, traded at 703,000 to the dollar on Wednesday, sinking beneath its previous record low. A small and rather suspicious rally late in the day brought it back up to 696,150, possibly staged by the Iranian Central Bank pumping hard currency into the market.
At its high-water mark, in the wake of Iran’s extremely lucrative nuclear deal with former President Barack Obama, the rial traded at 32,000 to the dollar.
The Associated Press (AP) on Wednesday spoke to Iranians who feared the returning President Trump would once again clobber Tehran with sanctions – or, to be more precise, might stop granting the endless waivers to sanctions that President Joe Biden was in the habit of handing out.
Although the regime insisted it had no preference between Trump and the defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, some of its subjects are dreading the economic collapse that fresh sanctions might trigger – and a few sounded hopeful that it might be enough to bring down the sinister theocracy.
“One-hundred percent he will intensify the sanctions,” an Iranian student told the AP. “Things that are not in our favor will be worse. Our economy and social situation will surely get worse. I feel the country is going to blow up.”
The AP spoke with two taxi drivers on opposite ends of the Iranian political spectrum. One of them compared Trump to “the devil” and said he has “eyes like Satan,” while the other said he would support making deals with Trump to help Iran, because “after all, he is a human being.”
Renewed sanctions could prove politically difficult for President Masoud Pezeshkian, ostensibly a “moderate” reformer who won a surprising victory in the July emergency election after hardline Islamist President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash.
Pezeshkian’s platform included promises to mend relations with the West and get sanctions lifted, but since his election he has grown more belligerent as Israel scored victory after victory against Iran’s terrorist proxies in Gaza and Lebanon.
“The Islamic Republic has to be terrified that the presidential candidate that they tried to kill has just won the election,” analyst Behnam Ben Taleblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) told Fox News Digital on Thursday.
“The regime knows it can ill afford more exogenous economic shocks. Even the return of maximum pressure alone to the Islamic Republic is going to cause major, major economic problems,” he predicted.
Taleblu cautioned there was a chance Iran would ramp up uranium processing and scramble to build a functional nuclear bomb before Trump takes office.
“Tehran knows maximum pressure is set to return. During this lame duck period, the nuclear saber rattling threat has to be taken seriously, particularly when its conventional deterrence has been so badly beaten,” he said, referring to Israel’s highly successful retaliatory airstrikes against Iran in late October.
