Report: Iran Used Senior Psychologists to Fine-Tune Messages for Trump Talks

Iran reportedly brought senior psychologists into the team handling indirect contacts with the United States, in an effort to map President Donald Trump’s thinking and tailor diplomatic messages to him. The claim came from American investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, a cofounder of Drop Site News, in an interview on the podcast Breaking Points.

Scahill said Iranian sources familiar with the talks told him the psychologists were asked to build a psychological profile of Trump and understand, as he put it, “what is going on in his mind.” According to those sources, negotiators began sending draft messages to the psychologists for review before the messages were passed to Trump through intermediaries.

Scahill quoted the sources as saying, “We started adapting our messages, as we passed them through senior psychologists before they reached Trump.” He said the Iranians believed the change had an effect, adding, “So we started to see progress.”

He described the approach as almost “clinical,” as if Trump were a patient whose reactions had to be decoded and met with adjusted treatment. The account fits Scahill’s earlier reporting that Tehran sees Trump’s unpredictability as a major obstacle in the talks and worries he could quickly shift his position under pressure from Israel or figures in his administration. The claims are based on anonymous Iranian sources, and there has been no official confirmation from Iran or the United States that psychologists were part of the negotiating team or helped draft messages.