On Nov. 10, for the second day in a row, the 2016 US presidential election was the main story on the front pages of every newspaper in Iran, with Donald Trump dominating photos, cartoons and illustrations. Shahrvand published a photo of Trump giving a thumbs-up from behind a curtain along with the banner headline “American Rebellion: Lonesome Billionaire Becomes US President.”
Abbas Abdi, a political activist and journalist who in 1979 was among the group of university students who stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, compared the elections in Iran and the United States in an article for Shahrvand. “Apparently the Iranian power holders’ disease of not being able to predict the result of the elections has spread to the developed world,” wrote Abdi. According to him, politicians in Washington had failed to anticipate Trump’s election because of their dependency on a media that in Abdi’s view does not highlight real American society, thereby deluding the country’s elite.
