“Death to America” signage has long been part of the macabre tourist trail in Tehran, as I saw for myself during a visit to the Iranian capital more than 20 years ago. In the entrance of the old US embassy, where the 444-day hostage crisis played out, there is a haunting depiction of Lady Liberty, her face replaced with a skull. Not far away, there is a tower-block-sized “Down with America” mural featuring what looks from a distance like the American flag. Get closer up, though, and you see the stars are actually skulls and the stripes look like streaks of blood.
Since the start of the Iran war, billboards have featured President Donald Trump lying in an open casket, the US Commander-in-chief as a corpse. Another shows portraits of individual members of the Trump family alongside flag-draped coffins. “Kill Trump” read cardboard placards held aloft during the six-day funeral of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose assassination on 28 February in a joint US-Israeli strike started the conflict.
This week a vile video, titled “How to Kill Melania”, was posted by the Tasnim News Agency, an outlet closely associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Using AI-generated imagery, the two-minute film identifies luxury Manhattan fashion stores frequented by the First Lady that would be “suitable for operations by global freedom fighters”. The video uses Melania Trump’s Secret Service codename – which has long been public knowledge – and outlines a number of well-known close protection techniques such as removing curb-side bins from motorcade routes. It ends with an ugly warning: “This is just the beginning. Barron Trump, wait for us.”
