New York (VINNEWS OP-ED) A billboard went up this week in Enghelab Square in central Tehran. It shows a “dead” President Trump lying in an open black coffin, eyes shut, hair mussed, hands folded across a red tie. Splashed across it in white graffiti, in Persian and in English, are the words: “We Will Kill Trump.”

Fat chance.

Consider what this billboard actually is. It is not a threat. It is a eulogy — for the regime that painted it.

Regimes that are winning do not advertise assassination fantasies on street corners. They advertise victories. The Islamic Republic once filled that same square with images of its own reach: proxies in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Gaza. The message then was look what we control.

That message is now gone, because those assets are gone. They are morally, ethically, spiritually, physically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably gone.  Hezbollah’s command structure was gutted. The Syrian land bridge — decades in the building, the artery through which Tehran armed its northern front — collapsed with Assad. The Iranian air defense network was demonstrated to be decorative. Nuclear facilities buried under mountains turned out not to be buried deep enough.

Ayatollah Khamenei himself is dead, killed on February 28 when the war began. A regime that cannot protect its own supreme leader inside his own capital is not in a position to reach across an ocean and touch the President of the United States. It is in a position to paint pictures.

That is precisely what it is doing. The billboard is a substitute for capability, not an expression of it. When the arsenal is intact, you use the arsenal. When it is rubble, you buy paint.

The deeper problem for the mullahs is not military. It is that they have lost their own people.

Iranian citizens have spent nearly five decades subsidizing an empire they never asked for. Billions flowed to Hezbollah, to Hamas, to the Houthis, to Shiite militias in Iraq — while the rial collapsed, while blackouts became routine, while water ran short, while inflation devoured savings, while a generation of educated young Iranians looked for exits.

They noticed. The 2009 Green Movement, the 2017 economic protests, the 2019 fuel riots, the 2022 uprising after Mahsa Amini’s death — each wave broader than the last, each met with more killing, each proving that the regime’s only remaining argument is force.

A government that must shoot its own daughters for uncovering their hair has already lost the argument. It is simply waiting for the sentence..

The regime is not threatening Trump because it can kill him. It is threatening Trump because its own street needs to be told that someone, somewhere, will be punished for Khamenei’s death — and the regime has no one else to offer. It cannot produce a retaliation. So it produces a poster.

This is the arithmetic of every dying autocracy. The gap between what it promises its people and what it can deliver widens until the promises become absurd. Then the people stop believing. Then it ends.

Ceaușescu spent his last morning giving a speech to a crowd he assumed was his. The crowd began to boo. Within a week he was dead. The mullahs are somewhere in that speech right now, and the booing has started.

If Tehran wants an honest billboard, this is the true image that belongs in Enghelab Square.