TEHRAN – Iranian officials have rejected claims made by U.S. President Donald Trump in his recent State of the Union address, accusing him of spreading deliberate falsehoods aimed at derailing upcoming nuclear negotiations between Tehran and Washington.

In his address to Congress, Trump asserted that the United States had destroyed Iran’s nuclear program during illegal strikes carried out last summer. He also claimed that Iran had killed more than 30,000 protesters, was developing longrange missiles and remained the world’s leading state sponsor of what he called “terrorism.”

Iranian officials say the remarks are part of a calculated disinformation campaign.

In a statement posted on X, Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said the repeated allegations made by U.S. officials and Israel rely on the deliberate construction of a false narrative.

“Professional liars are good at creating the illusion of truth,” Baghaei wrote.

He cited the propaganda maxim often attributed to Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels—“Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”—arguing that the tactic is now being systematically employed by the U.S. administration and its allies.

“This approach is being used by the U.S. government and the war profiteers surrounding it, particularly the genocidal Israeli regime, to advance a coordinated disinformation and misinformation campaign against the Iranian nation,” Baghaei said. He added that Washington and Tel Aviv were recycling false claims about Iran’s nuclear activities, missile capabilities and protest casualties to lay the groundwork for future aggression.

January unrest fatalities

Trump’s claim that more than 30,000 individuals were killed during unrest in January is a tenfold exaggeration. Iranian authorities have released a complete list of approximately 3,100 fatalities from the unrest, including names and identification numbers, after several days of investigations that involved inquiries with the Forensic Medicine Organization, cemeteries, and local hospitals. They have challenged anyone disputing the figures to present evidence.

The January riots began as peaceful demonstrations over economic hardship caused by years of U.S. sanctions and a sudden dollar shortage—an outcome that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent later acknowledged had been engineered by Washington. The situation deteriorated after infiltration by CIA and Mossad operatives, who took the streets with arms, killed security forces and civilians, and set public and private property on fire. Roughly 2,500 people were killed by these armed individuals. Around 600 rioters were killed during clashes with security forces. 

A second response to Trump’s remarks came from Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who recalled during a speech on Wednesday that he had previously warned the U.S. president against acting on faulty intelligence.

“Don’t analyze with wrong information and don’t make wrong decisions,” Qalibaf said he once told the U.S. president.

Qalibaf noted that U.S. intelligence agencies had falsely claimed the city of Mashhad had fallen to rioters during the unrest and pointed to Trump’s public statements on January 2 expressing support for those involved, comments that openly encouraged terrorism. 

The exchange comes before a third round of nuclear talks between Iran and the United States, scheduled for Thursday in Geneva.