Unity or fracture? Tehran battles Trump’s narrative of disarray

Assertions by US President Donald Trump that Iran’s leadership is divided, and Tehran’s increasingly coordinated effort to deny it, have thrust the issue of unity to the center of the standoff between the two countries. Trump has repeatedly cast Iran’s leadership as fractured and disorganized. In one post, he wrote: “Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know!” describing “infighting” between “‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all.”

As speculation spread, President Masoud Masoud Pezeshkian sought to set the tone in a social media post declaring: “In Iran there are no ‘hardliners’ or ‘moderates.’ We are all Iranians and revolutionaries.” The message was reposted verbatim by senior officials across the political and military establishment, including judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, Vice President Mohammad-Reza Aref, senior advisers, and the Supreme National Security Council, underscoring the coordinated nature of the response.
Mohseni-Ejei went further in a separate post, directly attacking Trump and calling the labels “hardliner” and “moderate” “fabricated and hollow terms” borrowed from Western political literature.

The messaging blitz from Tehran followed the collapse of negotiations in Islamabad and reports that parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf—who led Tehran’s delegation there—may have stepped down from the negotiating team, fueling speculation over internal disagreements about talks with Washington. Reports first circulated by Israel’s Channel 12 claimed Ghalibaf resigned following interference by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Other reports suggested he was reprimanded for trying to include Iran’s nuclear program in discussions with the United States. (Read More)