Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps issued a 26-page open letter to the American people Tuesday — an unprecedented move that directly targets U.S. voters as the paramilitary force claims victory in its war with the Trump administration.
The IRGC addressed “the honorable people of the United States of America — the scholars, the students, and the members of the media” in the letter, breaking with decades of messaging aimed only at foreign governments.
The paramilitary force claims the conflict initiated Feb. 28, 2026, by President Trump has resulted in more than 3,600 Iranian deaths, including 400 children. Eight universities, three hospitals, and eight schools have allegedly been bombed, the letter states.
“Yet, despite the unprecedented acts of cruelty and violence suffered by the Iranian nation during this war, the United States and Israel have suffered a crushing defeat, while the Islamic Republic of Iran has achieved a decisive victory,” the IRGC contends.
The Trump administration has maintained that U.S. strikes target only Iranian government infrastructure and military installations — not civilian areas.
“The root of the pain the two nations share is that the evil occupants of the White House, who come to power in elections that are dominated by misleading propaganda campaigns, do not truly represent the American people.”
The IRGC alleges Trump and Israeli officials initially stated their assault objectives were regime change and partition of Iran. After failing to achieve either, they “started blurting out a changing list of objectives, announcing a new objective with every passing week,” according to the letter.
That claim suggests internal IRGC doubt about Trump’s strategy — or an attempt to undermine American resolve as negotiations to end the war drag on.
The paramilitary force reserved its harshest language not for the American people but for what it calls “an elite cohort of powerful Zionist capitalists” who allegedly control U.S. elections and policy.
“American leaders violate not only the rights of other nations but also those of the American people, and they consistently place the interests of this small but powerful cohort above the interests of their own people,” the letter states.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung dismissed the letter as “a farcical and laughable attempt by a desperate group of people.”
This garbage “letter” is a farcical and laughable attempt by a desperate group of people (IRGC) who know they have no other options left because they have failed their own people, so they resort to telling the American people to “vote Democrat.”
People are smarter than that and… https://t.co/yoJIdDOSGS
— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) September 30, 2026
Cheung accused the IRGC of telling Americans to “vote Democrat” — a charge the letter’s framing appears to support. The paramilitary force recycled talking points from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, asserting the U.S. “has four percent of the world’s population but 20 percent of its prisoners” and that “more than 1,300 Americans are shot and killed by police in the streets” annually.
The IRGC also repeated its decades-old claim that “Death to America” chants at Iranian rallies target American political leadership, not the American people. The letter follows with a 73-year history of alleged U.S. hostility — beginning with the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government under Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of a dictatorship under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The paramilitary force took issue with its designation as a foreign terrorist organization — a label it has received from 24 countries plus the European Union.
The IRGC has been implicated in numerous attacks on Americans over decades. An IRGC captain was charged with the November 2022 death of Stephen Troell, an American aid worker and English-language teacher who was killed in Baghdad. IRGC-linked attacks were responsible for the deaths of 17 Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1983. Two more Americans were killed when the embassy was attacked in 1984.
One of the most brutal acts attributed to the IRGC and its Hezbollah proxies was the 1984 abduction of CIA station chief William Francis Buckley in Lebanon. Buckley was held in captivity for 15 months and subjected to severe physical and psychological torture before his corpse was dumped along a roadside.
During anti-Islamic Republic protests this past January, the IRGC and other government-aligned paramilitary forces were allegedly responsible for at least 3,000 Iranian deaths — though Time magazine reported the death toll could have been as high as 30,000.
The paramilitary force closed its letter with a sweeping indictment of American decline, claiming “[w]herever in the world a coup is staged, or a popular government is overthrown, the hand of the CIA is unmistakably evident.”
The letter’s direct message to the American people marks an evolution in Iran’s strategy. It may also signal an ongoing attempt by the IRGC to assert involvement in the country’s on-again, off-again negotiations with the Trump administration to bring the war to a close.
The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment as of publication.
