About that ‘Gay Ayatollah’ Story...
Team Trump cooked up a psyop about Iran’s new supreme leader, sources tell Zeteo. Plus, the president decides to pay TSA agents, and why Trump wants to keep attacking Iran on weekends.
🚨 Breaking: Early this morning, the Senate passed legislation that would fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, including TSA, but not ICE and Border Patrol. The bill now faces an uncertain future in the House.
Good morning! Swin and Andrew here, with a story of war, intrigue, and psychological warfare in the Trump-Vance era, one that “a lot of people” are talking about, as Donald Trump likes to say.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we peel back the onion on the “gayatollah” story put out about Mojtaba Khamenei, Trump will be the first president to put his signature on US dollars, and does it feel like the US president always escalates his war on the weekends?
Inside the ‘Gayatollah’ MAGA Group Chat
In recent weeks, following the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, several Trump administration officials and some of their close outside allies cooked up a plan to run a psyop against their Iranian enemies and the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, four sources tell us.
The idea was to plant a public narrative about how US intelligence agencies had classified information strongly indicating that Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei is gay and closeted. Under the regime in Tehran, LGBTQ Iranians are, of course, persecuted – and during Trump’s war on Iran, his administration has sought to sow discord, chaos, and division among the Iranian people and their government.
There is one issue, though: There is no intel, certainly no credible intel, indicating he’s gay – the idea was fabricated and pushed behind the scenes in the past several weeks by a cohort of Trump advisers, US government personnel, and MAGAworld associates, two people with knowledge of the matter and another two sources briefed on it tell us.
Some of them have been having a good laugh about it ever since. “We wanted to mindfuck [the Iranians] with gay shit,” one of the knowledgeable sources says. Another source – a Trump administration official familiar with how this all went down – adds that one of their MAGA group chats is titled, simply: “gayatollah.”
By late Thursday night, the White House had not responded to our request for comment. However, not long after we emailed our comment request, Trump suddenly appeared on TV blabbing about the topic.
The president was asked by Fox’s Jesse Watters if the CIA had told him that the new supreme leader is gay. “Well, they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them,” Trump replied. “I think a lot of people are saying that, which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country.”
As you would expect, Trump went on to claim he “did very well with the gay vote” (he did not) and that “no Republican’s ever gotten the gay vote like I did.”
The “gayatollah” tale burst into the public domain earlier this month – in spectacular, tabloid-y fashion.