Iran's 'We will kill Trump' billboard lands as midterm losses raise pressure on Trump to strike again

This week, a huge billboard and a set of banners went up over Enqelab Square in central Tehran. The billboard carries a pledge in English: "We will kill Trump." It shows the US president behind bars, head bowed. The message marks how personal the hostility toward Trump has become in official Iranian circles.

The timing is pointed. After Tuesday's US midterm elections, Iranian officials are claiming the result as their own. The Guardian's analysis notes that Iran has, in a sense, killed Trump, or at least his second term. The reversal also falls on the day Iran's leadership marks the anniversary of the 1979 seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, an episode that ensnared Jimmy Carter and a reminder that Iran has damaged the prospects of more than one American president.

The triumphalism has been loud. Ehsan Movaheidian, an international relations scholar, said the Islamic Republic had achieved regime change in America, that Europe would follow, and that the world should bow before Iran's power. Meisam Zohurian, a conservative member of parliament, said the joy had nothing to do with one party arriving or another leaving; the aggressor, he said, had been smeared in the dirt and Iran had influenced the outcome. Ali Nikzad, the parliament's first deputy speaker, called the electoral defeats aftershocks of Trump's defeat by the Iranian people.

The supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, struck a harder note. He wrote that anyone hoping US behaviour might change through partisan or factional shifts, or believing concessions could dissuade Washington from hostility, was seriously mistaken.

Behind the rhetoric is eight gruelling months of confrontation. Iran's resistance allowed the strait of Hormuz to become an Iranian-controlled channel through which inflation and high diesel prices reached the American economy. Trump himself conceded on Wednesday, and lamented, that Americans had decided the short-term pain of inflation was not worth paying to stop Iran becoming a nuclear power.

The open question is whether either side treats the results as a cue to rethink its diplomacy. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran's chief negotiator, urged Trump on social media to accept the verdict of the American people: whether driven by conscience or the cost of living, he wrote, America said no to war. He added that if Washington betrays the public will to serve international paymasters and blackmailers, it will learn that Iran's "no" comes with a nightmare.

Iran may face its own questions from the Gulf monarchies, and possibly from Russia and China. China, whose industries need Middle East oil blocked by the Hormuz blockade, seems to be stirring. Because it tends to knock only on doors it expects to open, the analysis suggests Beijing is testing a deal in which Iran would downblend, or dilute, its stockpile of highly enriched uranium inside Iran under international supervision. A Chinese special envoy is due to travel almost immediately to Oman, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Those countries can remind Tehran that any hope Trump would capitulate and turn his carrier fleet around was misplaced. Some Iranian diplomats had hoped midterm defeat and Republican pressure would bring concessions. Both sides, and the chief mediator, Qatar, tried to use polling day as leverage, and neither retreated. Trump kept to his position, stuck in a holding pattern of neither war nor peace, while suggesting repeatedly that a settlement was near in order to hold down oil prices.

Now, for the two months before the new Congress convenes in January and narrows his budgetary options, Trump has greater latitude and little accountability. Pro-war Trump influencers are pressing him to strike quickly. Laura Loomer wrote on X: "Time for President Trump to deal with Iran once and for all. Just do it, Nothing to lose now. Finish the job." Her credibility is damaged: in February she told Trump regime change in Iran, "a little excursion," could be as easy as toppling Venezuela's Maduro. Benjamin Netanyahu is meanwhile promoting intelligence that Iran is preparing chemical weapons, and the White House may have noticed how readily he produces such intelligence.

Hillary Clinton expects an attack. She said Trump will feel trapped, angry and resentful, and will react aggressively. Trump told Fox News this week that Iran has very few missiles and drones left and even less capacity to build more, adding that the US can end it any time. The analysis notes that such optimism has been heard before.