This past Easter Sunday the leaders of an Iranian opposition party in exile gathered for a celebratory picnic with family and friends at Lake Balboa Park in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Citrus-and-mint-scented hookah smoke wafted from a lakeside gazebo decked with the prerevolutionary flag of Iran, and a hundred or so people mingled around long picnic tables and considered the THANK YOU BIBI & TRUMP posters for sale. The revelers passed paper bowls of ash reshteh, a thick soup of beans and noodles, and munched on green almonds as a portable PA system blared the EDM track “Ayatollah Is Dead” and the Persian pop anthem “Javid Shah” (“Long Live the Shah”). Occasionally they broke into chants or toasts in support of Iran’s former crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, who has lived in the United States since his father was deposed during the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Over the previous five weeks, as the US and Israel embarked on a war explicitlyaimed at toppling the Islamic Republic, Pahlavi quickly ramped up his campaign to be installed as a “transitional” leader for Iran—though some supporters would like to see him rule more permanently.

LA is home to the largest concentration of Iranians outside Iran. Here the former crown prince has retained a dedicated base of support: in the “Tehrangeles” section of Westwood—the historic center of a Persian community that extends east into Beverly Hills and north into parts of the Valley—Pahlavi’s portrait hangs in local business windows. Starting in January, as the US flirted with intervening in the wave of anti-regime protests across Iran, Los Angeles-area events in support of Pahlavi became more frequent. The Constitutionalist Party of Iran, the picnic’s host, began organizing weekly rallies, alongside more informal groups. “We are just waiting for day zero,” when Pahlavi will “ask the Iranian people to go to the streets” and decisively end the Islamic regime, Arash Razi, forty-five, the CPI official in charge of Los Angeles operations, told me on April 1.

CPI’s weekly protests, where demonstrators hold signs supporting Trump and Pahlavi and chant for a “free Iran,” have drawn thousands to Westwood’s Wilshire Federal Building, a favorite neighborhood spot for political demonstrations. CPI is only one outfit in a constellation of shah-supporting groups in the diaspora, but it is by far LA’s most organized. Founded in 1994 by a royal minister in exile, the group remains linked to the “old guard” of monarchists, a patrician bunch who emigrated around the time of the revolution. Today supporters of the former crown prince range from younger hardliners, who advocate for a full restoration of the Pahlavi dynasty by any means necessary, to liberals who “uphold democratic values, and see Reza Pahlavi as just a symbol of return” to Iran, said Rachel Sumekh, a local Iranian Jewish activist.

CPI splits the difference on this spectrum. Its official platform favors a parliamentary democracy with a constitutional monarch, though this moderate proposal appears at odds with the group’s militarist messaging: it advocates for Trump to “stay the course” and “finish the job” in Iran—phrases used by Pahlavi himself—rather than negotiate a peace deal. In this sense CPI reflects the direction of the monarchist movement as a whole. Young radicals who “grew up with the idea that their country was stolen” have embraced war as “the solution to everything,” said Lior Sternfeld, a historian of the modern Middle East. Theirs, he added, is a “generation of despair.”

These diaspora monarchists have lately become a salient presence in Republican politics. In March a dedicated band descended on the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Texas, where they were “the only catalysts of any urgency” at an otherwise sleepy gathering, Haaretz reported. Their enthusiasm turned Pahlavi, who spoke on the final day, into an unofficial headliner. American attacks on Iran, Pahlavi said, had “leveled the playing field” against the Islamic Republic and needed to continue so that Iranians would have “the chance” to “reclaim their homeland.” This wasn’t the first time Pahlavi and his supporters had supplied “an Iranian face” for the US–Israeli war effort, noted Trita Parsi, an Iranian political analyst and cofounder of the Quincy Institute: after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the White House X account posted a video montage of Iranians in the diaspora doing the “Trump dance” in celebration.

Yet Trump’s announcement of a temporary cease-fire deal in early April—just ten days after Pahlavi, in his CPAC speech, urged the president to “stay the course”—reflects the limits of the movement’s power. When we spoke in mid-April, Parsi pointed out that the war for which the monarchists lobbied has not only failed to topple Iran’s theocratic regime “but actually delivered probably the most radical and hawkish version of the Islamic Republic yet.” With Trump having publicly abandoned regime change as a goal, Pahlavi’s supporters, Parsi fears, “will just become more and more radical, and more cultish, in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance of not only their failure but their betrayal of Iran.” As he observed, “They were dancing and celebrating while Iranian civilians were being killed.”

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LA first became a magnet for Iranian students studying abroad in the late 1960s, but the city’s Iranian population exploded after 1979, when tens of thousands of people fled the upheaval of the Islamic Revolution. Many of these émigrés were economic and court elites who had ties to the shah or were otherwise threatened by Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamic populism and its supporters. At Attari Sandwich Shop in Persian Square, the Westwood intersection where the community’s first businesses opened in the 1970s, you will overhear regulars conversing in Persian while you gobble down a beef tongue sandwich. A photo of Pahlavi visiting the restaurant sits near the register.

With Westwood at its heart, greater Tehrangeles has become home to a large number of Jews, Armenians, and Bahá’ís, minority groups who faced persecution after the revolution. Indeed, Westwood’s Sinai Temple became so identified with its influx of Persian congregants that Rabbi David Wolpe, in his final sermon before departing as senior rabbi in 2023, joked that “the person who is most responsible for the success of Sinai Temple” was Khomeini, at which point the sanctuary erupted in applause. Many Persian Jews in the area view Iran as “the place that betrayed us,” said Sophie Levy, an LA-based researcher of Persian Jewish history and culture. The Jewish community is strongly organized around Zionism, she added, and part of what drew younger Persian Jews in particular to Pahlavi—who has closely aligned himself with Israel—was the opportunity “to begin identifying as Iranian in a way where they didn’t have to check their Zionism, or their Jewishness, at the door.”

CPI, which comprises Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others, has two home bases in LA: a secret location where party members meet in private, and a more public one in a squat, glassy office tower on Ventura Boulevard, the commercial thoroughfare that traverses the San Fernando Valley. I met Razi there in early April. He told me that he comes from a political family: his grandfather, once an adviser to Iran’s longest-serving prime minister, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, was jailed in the infamous Evin Prison after the revolution. Born in 1980, Razi became an activist in his teenage years and clandestinely supported CPI inside Iran, where the party is banned, before emigrating in 2002.

During our meeting he sat in a faux leather armchair under a stock print of Manhattan skyscrapers and translated from Persian for a CPI colleague, Milad Afarinzadeh, thirty-eight. Now an electrician, Afarinzadeh had been a soccer and fitness coach in Iran. While we talked, he hooked two fingers into his lip to show me the gummy gaps where his back molars should be. He lost the teeth, he said, when he was arrested after a confrontation with police in Iran, and the prison guards broke his jaw and damaged his skull. “We are fighting to separate this regime from the Iranian people, because the Iranian people are inseparable [from] our land, our homeland,” Afarinzadeh said. (The next day, at the Easter picnic, Afarinzadeh showed me a fresh tattoo on his forearm featuring an outline of Iran and the autograph of the last shah.) Almost entirely a diaspora organization, CPI is a marginal presence in Iran’s activist underground, according to Barak Seener, a researcher at the UK think tank the Henry Jackson Society; Razi told me that the group’s activities in Iran are coordinated through the LA headquarters and declined to elaborate further.

The rise of the monarchist movement followed the downfall of Iran’s reformists. Starting in the late 1990s, a push for press freedom and institutional checks on the autocratic regime galvanized a broad swath of the country. But by the end of the 2000s the reformists had been vanquished by state crackdowns, electoral losses, and the mounting immiseration inflicted by Western sanctions, which eroded Iran’s politically active middle class. As the regime grew more brutal in its repression of any challengers, activists like Saeed Ghasseminejad—a prominent member of the pro-reform student movement who is now an adviser to Pahlavi—embraced a theory of change from without, including an ever more restrictive set of “maximum pressure” sanctions imposed by the US in 2018.

Pahlavi, for years, was just one opposition figure among several in the diaspora. But when a new pro-democracy coalition came together in support of the feminist-led Women, Life, Freedom movement—a wave of anti-government protests that rocked Iran in 2022 and 2023—Pahlavi positioned himself in an X post as above the effort, though technically he had been a participant in it, and many of his supporters went on social media to attack the group’s charter and its leaders. While Pahlavi and the monarchists were “irrelevant” to the Women, Life, Freedom protests, they “aggressively tried to hijack” the parallel movement in the diaspora, Sina Toossi, a senior nonresident fellow at the Center for International Policy, told me in an email. After the coalition’s rapid collapse in the spring of 2023, the monarchists emerged as the only “coherent organization standing,” said Kevan Harris, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. That April, having replaced his longtime coterie of advisers with younger, more radical figures like Ghasseminejad, Pahlavi took an unprecedented trip to Israel, during which he posed for a photo with Prime Minister Netanyahu and visited the Western Wall in a kippah. Afterward, Gila Gamliel, then the Israeli intelligence minister, said the visit was “of strategic importance to both” Israel and Iran.

The trip signaled Pahlavi’s entrance onto a larger stage. According to reporting by TheMarker and Haaretz, after his 2023 visit, Israel indirectly funded a Persian-language social media campaign that used fake accounts to promote the former crown prince and his cause. “The whole point of [that campaign] was to create an impression that everyone is in support of Pahlavi,” Parsi said. “And once everyone thinks that, a lot more people end up becoming supporters of Pahlavi because they’re just following the flow.” At the same time, the movement around Pahlavi tapped into genuine emotions. Amy Malek, a cultural anthropologist, recalled a March 2023 event in Toronto where some audience members were in tears at the sight of him. “I had done fieldwork in Toronto for years,” she said. “That was the first time, in person, that I’d seen so many people there really cheering for him.”

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On Tuesday, January 6, as Iranians took to the streets in cities across the country to protest a deepening economic crisis and the regime’s repression, Pahlavi made a serious gamble, posting a “call to action” on Instagram in which he asked his supporters to chant at exactly 8 p.m. on that Thursday and Friday; he said he would announce further calls to action “based on your response.” In chanting for Pahlavi’s return, many likely assumed he wouldn’t make the request “if he didn’t have a plan, or if he didn’t have an organization on the ground,” said Peyman Jafari, a historian of the modern Middle East. “But he didn’t.”

The regime responded to the protests by massacring demonstrators in the thousands and cutting off Internet service. Yet many Iranians, at least in the diaspora, now looked to Pahlavi for more such announcements, holding his portrait while chanting “long live the shah” at rallies. As Trump made vague promises to “help” the Iranian people “take over your institutions,” Pahlavi lobbied for US military intervention: a week after the massacre of protesters, in remarks at the National Press Club in Washington, he called for a “surgical strike” on the country. In a video posted to X in mid-January, the hawkish senator Lindsey Graham sat next to Pahlavi on a sofa and told him, “You have really risen to the occasion.” The former crown prince had become the closest thing the opposition had to a global leader.

And yet his claim to that title is at best contested. While most Iranians across the diaspora, both within and beyond the LA metro area, are firmly opposed to the Islamic Republic, further numbers remain skeptical of the former crown prince and his followers. When asked in March which figure would be “most likely to help move Iran toward a democratic system of government,” Iranian American respondents were ambivalent; 50 percent chose Pahlavi, while 23 percent were “not sure,” and 9 percent selected “none” of the available options. And indeed the sixty-five-year-old Pahlavi, a longtime resident of Potomac, Maryland, has few qualifications for the job he’s seeking. A political neophyte, he came into adulthood as an unemployed, mansion-dwelling family man at the margins of global affairs. Though portrayed by his advisers as a combative, Trump-like leader, “he’s the furthest thing from a tough guy,” Arash Azizi, a lecturer at Yale who has met Pahlavi, told me, describing the former crown prince as a “craven figure” who makes promises he can’t keep.

For all Pahlavi’s flattery of Trump, the president has never reciprocated his affection, instead observing in January that while Pahlavi “seems very nice,” it might be “more appropriate” for Iran to have a leader who is already inside the country. Drawing a contrast with María Corina Machado, the potential leader-in-waiting of Venezuela whom Trump spurned after the US invasion of that country, Parsi said that “whatever level of support [Machado] had in the security establishment in Venezuela was way more than what Pahlavi has in Iran. It’s not even comparable.” Even as they geared up for war, The New Yorker reported, the president and his aides referred to Pahlavi as the “loser prince” behind closed doors.

Pahlavi has nonetheless kept up appearances, posting campaign-style ads on social media and video messages in which he speaks directly to his “brave and warrior compatriots” in “our occupied homeland,” sometimes with an elegant bookshelf in the background. “We are now at the decisive stage of our final struggle,” he says in one March video. “To the military and law enforcement forces: this is your last chance to break from the oppressive forces and join your people. Await my final call.” Iranians are still waiting; no significant defections have occurred.

At a mid-March rally organized by CPI one scorching hot Sunday on Ventura Boulevard, however, the energy remained high. “This is not a war against Iran. This is a rescue mission,” declared Negin Ghaffari, a volunteer commissioner for the city of Calabasas, using Pahlavi’s term for the war. American, Israeli, and prerevolutionary Iranian flags—a green-white-and-red tricolor with a lion and sun—hung above the stage. At least two thousand people, many with pro-Pahlavi, pro-Trump, and “Make Iran Great Again” signs or clothing, crowded on either side of the boulevard near Woodland Hills Market, a mainstay Persian grocery store. “Who is your leader?” an organizer shouted into the microphone. “King Reza Pahlavi!” the crowd shouted back. Tamar Nissim, an official from the Israeli-American Council, which helped promote the rally, told the crowd, “Israel and America are together for you,” while the filmmaker Steven Barber, who has lately gainednotoriety for making larger-than-life statues of Trump, flamboyantly mangled Pahlavi’s name: “Pavlavi? Did I get that right? Yes, Pavlavi, the next president of Iran! Woo-hah!”

“These are good days,” Navid Nazar, fifty-five, a longtime CPI member from Beverly Hills, told me on the sidelines. That an American missile had struck an elementary school two weeks earlier and killed at least 175 people didn’t change his outlook. “They’re not there to kill Iranians,” he said. Wearing a CPI cap and a polo shirt depicting an American flag with a bald eagle in flight, the Tehran-born Nazar, who is Jewish, compared the war with Iran to the liberation of France during World War II: “Israel and the US are doing the same thing for my people.”

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Now Pahlavi’s star seems to have fallen decisively. Days before the Easter picnic Trump had apparently foreclosed the possibility of installing the former crown prince, declaring that “regime change has occurred” as a result of the month-long war and that the “new group” of leaders in Iran was “much more reasonable” than the previous cadre, whom Israeli and American strikes had systematically assassinated. In that same primetime address, on April 1, the president claimed that regime change was “never” the war’s goal. A week later the US and Iran agreed to the temporary cease-fire.

“The success of the Pahlavi project was in convincing some operatives in the Republican party that he was readily available to replace the Islamic Republic,” Sternfeld told me. “But Reza Pahlavi has no part in Trump’s vision for Iran.” As for his fervent supporters in the Iranian diaspora, Sternfeld predicted, “the moment the reality hits that Trump threw Pahlavi under the bus, you’re going to see a major tantrum in this community”—including an about-face on Trump.

For now, Trump remains enormously popular among the monarchists I spent time with this spring. “Cease-fire or no cease-fire, it’s not going to stop us,” Foad Pashai, CPI’s secretary general, told me on April 11, days after the deal was announced. In fact, Pashai, a seventy-one-year-old building contractor with a trim silver mustache, told a story of success: “Forty years ago, when we started, nobody supported us,” he said. Now “the movement is getting stronger,” while the regime “is trying to stop the opposition any way they can.” This has created a certain amount of anxiety among CPI members. Pashai estimated that the Islamic Republic had “more than a couple hundred cells” in the US, and that, “if they find anybody fighting against them, out of [Iran], they take all the money from his family,” or else kill him.

I had experienced this preoccupation with threats firsthand. At the picnic the previous weekend, Pashai approached me with Nazar. The regime has “a bunch of people they hire to get information from the opposition,” Pashai said, and they needed to make sure I wasn’t one of them. He wanted to photograph my ID to share it with an FBI contact “if something happened.” I produced my driver’s license but covered the most sensitive information with my fingers. “No, no,” said Nazar. “We have to get the whole thing.” I refused, and the two of them, facing me on the lawn, quickly grew aggressive. Pashai complained that I’d asked him about his personal security (he is, after all, a known opponent of an autocratic regime). Shouting, close to my face, he told me he was fighting against “a terrorist regime,” the Palestine Liberation Organization, ISIS, and the Taliban.

Nazar was still demanding to see my information when Razi walked by. “How are you, brother? Want something to drink?” I thanked him but said it was time for me to leave. “This is the final battle!” someone called out in Persian. “Pahlavi will return!” came the group’s chanted reply.