Trump promotes lame “gayatollah” claim about Iran’s leader

Aides apparently cooked up a story about the new ayatollah based on no credible intel. Trump ‘laughed out loud’ upon hearing it weeks ago, and just pushed it further on Fox.

In case you missed it, Donald Trump responded publicly to a whipped-up claim that some of his aides and advisers planted in the New York Post two weeks ago: that “spy agencies” have determined that Iran’s new Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the hardline ultra-conservative who was installed after a US strike killed his father, is gay and closeted.

As the Post described it on March 16, Trump “laughed out loud” upon being briefed about it in the White House shortly after Khamenei took power, while others in the room found it “hilarious.” The idea seemed to be that gay equals weak, and thus this guy is going to be a pushover, which tells you everything you need to know about what Trump thinks of gays. (All the more cringy that people like Scott Bessent and Richard Grenell work for him.)

The unverified story went relatively nowhere after the right-wing tabloid published it—clearly because it was hatched by some in Trump’s inner circle as a psyop, according to Zateo.

That is, until Jesse Waters raised it on Fox a few days ago.

“Did the CIA tell you that Ayatollah Jr. is gay?” Watters asked.

“Well, they did say that, but I don’t know if it was only them. Which puts him off to a bad start in that particular country,” Trump replied, alluding to Iran’s brutal death penalty for homosexuality.

Then Trump quickly went off on a tangent about his shock that there are “gays for Palestine,” and eventually landed on a typical, full-blown lie, claiming he “did well” with the gay vote in the U.S., better than any Republican president. (In fact, he did worse in 2024 than any president—Democrat or Republican—including worse than himself in 2016 and 2020, getting only 14% of the vote, as Kamala Harris took 86% of the queer vote).

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As reported in Zeteo, where Asawin Suebsaeng has great White House sources who always spill the tea, the tale of the gay ayatollah was a fabrication, “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…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.”

So lame.

As noted, the group first planted this baked-up claim in the New York Post, likely hoping it would take off from there into actual news outlets—which it did not. That story included Trump’s reaction of laughing out loud. It was typical tabloid salaciousness, innuendo, and idiocy, devoid of any evidence:

Mojtaba, who is believed to have been wounded in the same Feb. 28 airstrike that killed his father and other members of his family, has made “aggressive” sexual overtures to men caring for him, possibly while under the influence of heavy medication, one of The Post’s sources said.

US spy agencies do not have photographic evidence of Mojtaba Khamenei’s alleged sexual attraction to men, but the sources insisted the tip is solid, with one saying it was “derived from one of the most protected sources that the government has.”

Some of the Post’s “evidence” of “whispering” among Iran’s leaders about Mojtaba Khamenei’s sexual orientation includes the fact that he married “late in life”—around age 30!—and had an “impotency problem” that was “treated and resolved during a three-month stay” in the UK. (He and his wife did then have a child, who grew to be a teenager who was reportedly killed in the strike that killed his grandfather and also his mother.)

“His father and others suspected he was gay, and that was something that people were spreading to try to stop his ascension,” a source apparently told the Post.

Seriously, if the elder Khamenei believed his son was gay, do you think he’d be alive in a country that kills gay people—or at the very least not shipped out far away? And if, as the Post claims, everyone in the government knew about it, would he have been installed? And, if the new ayatollah is so badly injured and may not even be conscious—as the White House and Trump aides keep telling us—how was he making “aggressive” sexual overtures to the men taking care of him?

Beyond all that, the idea that somehow this would sow dissent and chaos within the Iranian leadership—when Trump and the U.S. have steadfastly lied to the Iranians, even during negotiations, during which they then began bombing Iran—is pretty ludicrous.

Even Trump, when Waters brought it up, shifted quickly onto other things—“gays for Palestine” and his falsehood of doing well with gays in the U.S.—obviously knowing he was promoting fiction created by MAGA operatives. These are the masterminds surrounding Trump, and that’s why all of this is a continued disaster.