Twenty-five pages.
That’s how long it took Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to tell Americans how to vote.
The letter dropped Tuesday at a press conference in Tehran. English and Farsi. Five weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms.
The delivery man was Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The audience was American students, professors, journalists, and voters.
The message fits on a bumper sticker: The war is Trump’s fault. It’s Israel’s fault. Fix it in November.
Mohebbi called the president a habitual liar. Insanely greedy. The letter warned that America’s economy is on the brink, the dam about to break.
Consider the source.
The same day Tehran lectured us about collapse, the Iranian rial hit a record low. More than 2.5 million to the dollar.
Under the American blockade, Iran’s trade is in free fall. Oil through the Strait of Hormuz is moving at half its prewar pace.
Mohebbi even spent part of his press conference insisting Iran still controls the strait.
You only say that when everyone thinks you don’t.
So a regime whose currency is worth less than the paper it’s printed on is warning us about the cliff.
It’d be funny if you didn’t know who wrote it.
The IRGC isn’t a debating club. Washington designated it a terrorist organization in 2019. It armed the militias that spent years killing American troops in Iraq. It’s the backbone of Hezbollah and the Houthis.
Now it wants a say in our elections.
Then there’s the nuclear claim. The letter says Trump is hiding the “peaceful nature” of Iran’s program.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, hardly a Trump shop, has flagged Tehran enriching uranium far past anything a power plant needs.
Peaceful programs don’t keep inspectors guessing.
So why now?
Desperation.
Confident regimes don’t write open letters to the other side’s voters. They don’t call press conferences to explain the shipping lanes are fine, really.
This letter isn’t strength. It’s a tell.
Mohebbi basically admitted it. He told reporters he didn’t expect the letter to change the administration’s course. He just hoped voters would hear it.
That’s the whole strategy. Tehran can’t win the war. It’s trying to outlast it. Wait for American patience to crack, and help it along.
He even urged Americans to take to the streets.
None of this is new. Just bolder.
In 2020, Iranian operatives emailed American voters posing as Proud Boys. Treasury slapped them with sanctions.
Back then, they wore a costume. This time, they signed their name.
Look, Americans disagree about this war. The cost. Gas prices. How it ends.
Those are fair fights. They’re ours.
We argue them at kitchen tables, in town halls, on the radio. We settle them at the ballot box, because we live with the results.
We don’t need a co-author in Tehran.
