Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced “acts of terror and terrorism” on Sunday, seemingly in response to the assassination attempt on former U.S. President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania on Saturday evening, although Ahmadinejad did not refer to Trump by name in his message.
“Acts of terror and terrorism, both state and non-state, are among the most heinous anti-human actions, the depth of whose evil, words cannot fully express. Humanity is suffering such severe pains all over the world,” Ahmadinejad said on Twitter, where he has over 144,000 followers, although his account has been largely inactive for about two years.
Ahmadinejad was president of Iran from 2005 through 2013, after which he held some bureaucratic posts before ostensibly retiring from politics. He un-retired in 2017 to run for the presidency again, only to find himself disqualified by the Guardian Council, the theocratic body that rigs Iranian elections by disqualifying all but a handful of candidates, usually on religious grounds.
Ahmadinejad reinvented himself as a fiery populist critic of the “moderate” administration that succeeded him – the administration that negotiated Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with former U.S. President Barack Obama – and later became an equally determined critic of the theocracy, possibly because it kept kneecapping his presidential aspirations.
Ahmadinejad tried again in 2021, and in the 2024 special election to replace the late Ebrahim Raisi, but was disqualified both times. He has a substantial following and frequently boasts he would win easily if allowed to run again.
Iran’s hard-line former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waves to the media as he leaves at the conclusion of a press briefing beside portraits of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, top right, and the late President Ebrahim Raisi at the Interior Ministry, in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
One of Ahmadinejad’s favorite techniques for keeping himself politically relevant is writing long, crabby open letters to world leaders, including the previous three American presidents. He wrote a relatively mellow letter to President Trump in 2017 complaining about Trump’s ban on immigration from several terrorism-supporting Muslim countries, including Iran, plus Venezuela and North Korea.
Trump said last year he would bring back a travel ban “even bigger than before” if he is re-elected, to “keep radical Islamic terrorists and jihadists out of our country.”
“We don’t want people blowing up our shopping centers. We don’t want people blowing up our cities and we don’t want people stealing our farms. So it’s not gonna happen,” Trump said in July 2023, arguing that his 2017 ban helped to prevent such things from occurring.
Ahmadinejad’s denunciation of terrorism “both state and non-state” after the Trump shooting could be taken as a jab at the Iranian theocracy, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism.
In an interview with an Iranian website conducted shortly after he was disqualified from running in the 2024 election, Ahmadinejad criticized the policies of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke wistfully of life under the deposed Shah of Iran before the Islamic revolution, and expressed a willingness to negotiate with Donald Trump if he returns to the White House.