They wrote it in English so there would be no confusion about who it was for.
For a week, crowds moved through Iran carrying the body of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the Khamenei funeral processions turned into something the world had not seen at this scale before. Massive scarlet banners reading “We Will Kill Trump.” Posters with his face inside crosshairs and the words “There will be blood.” An effigy of him strung up and hanging over the procession route in Tehran. Chants of death to America. One mourner told the Associated Press that they had not come to say goodbye. They had come for revenge, and they would take it.
The procession ran through Tehran, then Qom, then across the border into the Iraqi shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala, and ended Thursday at the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, where Khamenei was buried. Banners with the same message were hung off buildings in the city overnight. Iranian state television aired helicopter footage of a crowd stretching for miles down Azadi Street.
Khamenei was killed on February 28 in a joint US and Israeli strike on Tehran, along with four members of his family. He had ruled Iran for thirty seven years. His son Mojtaba was named supreme leader a week later by a clerical assembly, and here is the part that tells you how unsteady things really are over there: nobody has seen him since. He was badly injured in the same strike that killed his father, his face disfigured, and he has issued nothing but written statements. No photo. No video. No voice.
So the funeral was doing double duty. It was a burial, and it was a show of force by a government that needed one.
Reuters made a point that most coverage skipped, and it deserves to be said here. Iranian authorities are presenting those enormous crowds as proof that the theocracy is beloved and unshaken. But this is the same country where mass nationwide protests over poverty and repression broke out just months ago, where Khamenei’s legacy is bitterly contested, and where people have risen up against this government again and again. A million people in the street can mean a nation united. It can also mean a state that knows how to fill a street.
Then came the response.
Late Friday night, Trump got on Truth Social and wrote that 1,000 missiles are locked and loaded and aimed at Iran, with thousands more behind them, should the Iranian government act on the threat to assassinate him. He said the orders have already been given. He said the military is ready for a one year campaign, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.
Then he signed off with four words in all caps. Praise be to Allah.
Nobody has explained that. Not his people, not the diplomats, not anybody.
What sits underneath all of this is genuinely serious. The Wall Street Journal reported that Israel passed along intelligence about a fresh Iranian plot on Trump’s life, though CNN reported that what was actually picked up looked more like hardliners in Tehran talking about killing him than an operational plan, and some US officials did not find it fully credible. Iran has denied plotting to kill him. There have also been multiple attempts on his life since 2024. The fear is not invented.
But look at the exchange for what it is. A crowd in the street promising to kill one man. One man promising to destroy a country of ninety million people, most of whom have never held a banner in their lives and have spent years protesting the same government now speaking in their name.
The strikes have not stopped for any of it. The United States has hit more than a hundred Iranian linked targets. Iran has fired on American bases across the region. Three commercial vessels were attacked in the Strait of Hormuz. The Treasury yanked the waiver that let Iran sell its oil. Trump has declared the ceasefire over while simultaneously saying talks will continue.
Two governments are trading threats of annihilation on loudspeakers and social media apps, and neither one of them will be standing anywhere near the blast.
