In the run-up to the midterm elections, Iranian state media is gleefully chronicling high prices at American gas pumps — and their impact on President Trump’s political standing.

Outlets like Tehran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency cite polls reflecting voter anger at Mr. Trump over his conflict with Iran.

Iranian officials are piling on. In an open letter to Americans last month, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps wrote that Mr. Trump “keeps on telling Americans that the economy is booming and the prices will soon start coming down,” adding: “This is, perhaps, his biggest lie.”

A few days earlier, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, mocked a spike in U.S. Treasury bond rates. “We’ll return you to 1970s rates, plus high gas prices, diesel shortages and bell-bottoms. Enjoy the nostalgia!” he wrote.

Iran’s leaders clearly relish the political damage Mr. Trump has suffered from the conflict he launched in late February, even as their own economy suffers extreme stress from U.S. sanctions and an American naval blockade.

There are signs that political and economic pressure has pulled Mr. Trump back from the brink of military escalation, and the election result could determine what steps the United States takes next.

“They’re desperate to try and affect the election, so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there, and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon,” Mr. Trump told reporters last month.

It is not the first time Iran has been suspected of maximizing political pain against an American president. After Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took dozens of Americans hostage in November 1979, U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Iran was drawing out the crisis “to bring about President Carter’s defeat” in the 1980 election, as a declassified C.I.A. analysis put it that year.

For years, Iranian leaders have threatened to kill Mr. Trump, and in March a federal jury convicted a Pakistani national working as an Iranian intelligence agent of entering the United States in 2024 to arrange Mr. Trump’s assassination. Humiliating Mr. Trump in the elections is a way for Iran to get “satisfaction without doing something more drastic,” said Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Iran’s ability to menace the Strait of Hormuz and attack the energy infrastructure of its neighbors has given Iran valuable insights into how it can exert pressure over the United States and the global economy.

Read more on original:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/politics/iran-trump-midterm-elections.html