TAPPER: In our World Lead, is the United States losing the propaganda war to Iran? Let’s start with the most recent big exchange. This meme from the White House two days ago shows President Donald Trump holding Uno cards, and the text states, “I have all the cards.”

Now, unfortunately, if you’ve ever played Uno, the objective is to have no cards. Having all the cards is a losing hand. So, the Iranian Consulate General in India replied on X with a meme saying, yes, we have less cards, and his cards are draw four, which is how you win Uno, forcing the other person to have all the cards.

Since the start of the war, official Iranian government and embassy accounts, plus some regime and propaganda groups-based in Iran have been dropping a whole bunch of English language memes and A.I.- generate-generated videos all over the place. Trump allies might be concerned. Some of these posts are racking up millions of views, and they borrow from American culture and mock Trump.

There’s these viral videos from a group called Explosive Media that show A.I.-generated animation in the style of the Lego movies, with world leaders caricatured as yellow bobbleheads, missiles as plastic bricks. The Iranian Embassy in South Africa posted a 1980s-style A.I. video of President Trump singing about a blockade in the strait. Here’s a post from the same embassy with the caption, the way the United States closed the Strait of Hormuz, and it shows a guy accidentally welding his own head inside a railing.

Here’s another from the same embassy showing Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the miserable pirates of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian Embassy in Thailand posted this Trump campaign poster saying, Trump twenty twenty-eight per gallon, $28.28 per gallon, mocking high gas prices.

Let’s bring in Peter Pomerantsev. He’s a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Agora Institute researching propaganda, disinformation, the impact of information warfares on politics.

Peter, I hate to say it because the regime clearly are the bad guys, but they’re not bad at this.

PETER POMERANTSEV, SENIOR FELLOW, JOHNS HOPKINS AGORA INSTITUTE: No they’ve really been very, very cunning and very successful. I mean, we saw the Lego videos where, you know, the Iranians are using Lego videos to kind of do two things. They’re cleansing their own image, because no longer are they the mad mullahs of our narratives. They’re now these cute Lego characters.

TAPPER: Right.

POMERANTSEV: While at the same time making Trump look small. So, in one little move, you’ve changed how people perceive you, you’ve detoxified yourself, and at the same time you’ve humiliated Trump. That’s pretty canny.

TAPPER: So, I do wonder, I mean, I know it’s probably impossible to gauge like how effective one video is because, you know, we’re not creatures — we’re not brains in a vat, right? I mean, like, you know, we’re experiencing everything all at once, but this seems like pretty effective compared to other stuff I’ve seen from other enemies of the United States, whether Hamas or the Russians or the Chinese.

What do you make of it? First of all, who’s making these videos? Are they just people in Iran?

POMERANTSEV: Yes, there appears to be, from the reporting that we know a unit within the Iranian forces, not actually that big, but clearly with an incredible understanding of American narrative sensibilities and culture, and they’re weaponizing American culture against itself, which is, you know, the really clever thing to do in propaganda. You’re using kind of the force of your enemy against them.

It is hard to measure effect. I mean, in terms of views, we’re talking actually hundreds of millions of views for some of these videos. It’s spectacular. Are they making — and they’re clearly aimed at making the war less popular in America.

The war was pretty unpopular already so it’s hard to measure change. A lot of them are also — look, they’re fluffy. I put that in inverted commas. They’re deeply anti-Semitic. You know, a lot of them are very much aimed at the idea of a kind of Jewish conspiracy running America. We can see the figures around support for Israel, the rising anti- Semitism in America.

Are they helping that? Are they surfing the wave of that? That’s very hard to tell, but they’re definitely like within a context that is increasing.

TAPPER: In terms of the information wars, I mean, what we saw out of Gaza during, you know, the really intense war of Israel versus Hamas, a lot of that wasn’t like this. A lot of it was just victims of war. This is a very different approach.

POMERANTSEV: That was very, very effective as well and that sort of like, you know, the videos of, you know, that horrendous suffering was very powerful.

TAPPER: Yes.

POMERANTSEV: My sense, these videos, however, might get to a different audience, because that audience affected people who were open to that kind of sympathy. My sense, these videos are going for MAGA supporters. They’re going for the kind of the supporters who might go with Trump a lot of the time because they’re not playing that card. They’re not playing the sympathy card. They’re playing issues around, you know —

TAPPER: Well, they’re saying Trump is corrupt. He’s controlled by the Israelis.

POMERANTSEV: Well, they talk about two things, Israel and Epstein, Epstein and Israel. That is a huge dividing line within the MAGA coalition.

So, these ads seem to be really going for that. They’re not going for Columbia students. They seem to be going for the heart of the MAGA coalition. Whether it’s successful, we would need to research.