The occasion was a geostrategic rarity even by the rigid standards of theocratic Iran. When the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was literally centre-stage at the Friday prayers, he utilised the opportunity to address a rare sermon that was intrinsically an attempt to debunk the likes of Donald Trump. Thus did he accord precedence to the diplomatic joust over the customary recital of religious homilies.

The speech was delivered in the aftermath of the missile strikes against the US, the downing of a US-made Boeing killing 176 innocents, the drone attack that killed an Iranian General in Baghdad, the renewed cache of US sanctions, and most recently the formation of a latter-day Concert of Europe against Iran.

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Crisis has piled on crisis and the five developments in quick succession have brought the two countries almost to the point of war. The American President was severely lampooned, with Ayatollah Khamenei branding him as a “clown” during a profoundly religious congregation, indeed on the holiest day of the week in the calendar of Islam. Trump, he told the gathering in Tehran, “pretended to support the Iranian people, but would push a poisonous dagger into their backs”.

The remark comes in the immediate aftermath of the US claim that 11 of its troops had been injured in the missile attacks on 8 January ~ “a day of God” in the perception of the Ayatollah. It was a public condemnation of a Head of State, if ever there was one. It is pretty obvious too that Khamenei has struck a defiant tone following weeks of domestic and international turbulence.

Though the two developments are wholly unrelated, Iran’s highest authority has bared his angst 24 hours after impeachment proceedings were initiated against the US President in the Senate. Trump responded with a series of tweets on Friday evening. “The socalled “Supreme Leader” of Iran, who has not been so Supreme lately, had some nasty things to say about the United States and Europe,” he wrote tongue firmly in cheek.

In another tweet, translated into Farsi, he called on Iranian leaders to “abandon terror and Make Iran Great Again!” That the war of nerves has begun in right earnest on either side of the icy Atlantic can scarcely be ignored. Iran’s embattled regime is reeling from a wave of international condemnation and domestic criticism after admitting that its forces shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane and then lied in an attempt to cover up its role in the tragedy.

Scenes of mourning for General Suleimani were followed by four days of protests over the plane disaster, when demonstrators chanted “Death to Khamenei” and “Clerics get lost”. In Friday’s sermon Khamenei focused on national unity in the face of “external enemies”. And unmistakable is his anxiety to reassure the domestic constituency, with the patience of the people sorely tried over the economic blitz in the wake of crippling sanctions.