Image courtesy of Student News Agency, SNN.ir
There are days in Washington where the news writes its own punchline. Sunday was one of those days.
The New York Post reported that President Trump was briefed last week by U.S. intelligence on Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei — the man the IRGC installed to replace his father after Operation Epic Fury ended Ali Khamenei’s reign. The intelligence report contained a detail so perfectly ironic that Trump reportedly burst out laughing on the spot. Others in the room joined him. One senior intelligence official, according to sources, has not stopped laughing about it for days.
What was in the report?
U.S. intelligence indicates that Mojtaba Khamenei is “probably gay” — and has maintained a long-term relationship with his childhood tutor.
Iran is not a country that takes a nuanced view on homosexuality. Under the Islamic Republic’s interpretation of sharia law, homosexual acts are punishable by death. Gay men have been executed, hanged, and thrown from buildings under the regime that Mojtaba’s father built and that Mojtaba himself helped run for years as the IRGC’s political enforcer and his father’s gatekeeper.
The regime that has spent the last 45 years executing gay men just installed a reportedly gay Supreme Leader to carry on the revolution.
There is no political analyst, no foreign policy expert, no satirist alive who could have written this script. The irony is total, complete, and entirely self-generated by the people who spent decades screaming about Western moral corruption while reportedly harboring this particular secret at the very top of their theocracy.
The internet noticed immediately. Within hours of the New York Post story dropping, X was flooded with the kind of commentary that no editor could have planned and no opposition research shop could have manufactured. The regime’s own ideological foundation — its entire claim to divine moral authority — is being mocked globally based on intelligence about its own leader.
The gay intelligence wasn’t even the most damaging detail in the briefing. Additional U.S. intelligence, separately reported by CBS News, indicates that the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had serious private reservations about his son’s fitness to lead. In private conversations, the elder Khamenei reportedly considered Mojtaba “not very bright” and expressed doubt that he was suited to run the Islamic Republic.
So the man now holding the title of Supreme Leader of Iran was considered unfit by his own father, reportedly maintained a secret relationship his regime would execute others for, and was installed primarily because the IRGC needed a controllable figurehead after the old one died in an American-Israeli air campaign.
Here is the kicker — and it is quintessential Trump. After being briefed on the intelligence, the president reportedly told people close to him that he wasn’t even sure any of it mattered. His reasoning: he thinks Iran is essentially leaderless right now, and he’s not convinced Mojtaba is actually capable of ruling after being severely injured by America and Israel’s air strikes.
Think about that for a second. The leader of the free world was just briefed that Iran’s Supreme Leader is probably gay — and his response was essentially, “Interesting, but he might already be dead anyway.”
That is not a man who is worried about Iran. That is a man who just destroyed their military, watched their regime install a compromised figurehead under duress, and is now waiting to see how the rubble settles.
The Islamic Republic spent 45 years positioning itself as the moral vanguard of the Muslim world. The U.S. intelligence community just handed the world a report that may be the funniest — and most devastating — paragraph ever written about a sitting head of state.
God, it turns out, does have a sense of humor. And apparently so does the CIA.