commentary
Trump hopes the Iran protests can save his presidency — while he crushes protest at home. It won’t work
Published
January 18, 2026 9:00AM (EST)
Protesters rally on Jan. 8, 2026, in Tehran. (Anonymous/Getty Images)
If there are visible signs of light amid this dark winter in America, they emanate from two obvious sources: The Trump administration is becoming increasingly desperate, and both the mainstream media and its “normie” consumers are no longer kidding themselves. If that sounds a little too much like Jean-Paul Marat during the French Revolution, who argued that violence and chaos were necessary to destroy the complacency of the privileged classes and bring down the established order, I plead about half-guilty. Violence is never cleansing or beneficial, but it can certainly render hidden truths more visible.
Donald Trump and his minions have stopped even pretending not to be shameless hypocrites. If anything, they have embraced the blatant hypocrisy and doublethink of the MAGA movement as a positive good, much as the Nazi Party and similar fascist or ultra-nationalist movements once did. Last Tuesday, the president posted to Truth Social about the street protests against the repressive regime in Iran and then, about an hour later, about the street protests against the federal invasion or occupation of Minneapolis. I hardly need to tell you that the tone and content were quite different, a fact that Peter Baker of the New York Times — a reporter previously derided by leftists as a regime-friendly stenographer — noted in acrid detail.
President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”
He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
No one outside the Trump cult could miss the resonance here, and I don’t think the Trump cultists did either. Although the specific events occurring in Iran and Minnesota, and their social and political contexts, “are different and complicated,” as Baker dutifully puts it, these protests are categorically and thematically similar: Ordinary citizens are taking to the streets, in surprising numbers and at great risk to their safety and even their lives, to resist an authoritarian crackdown.
To belabor the obvious, Trump doesn’t remotely understand what’s happening in Iran and doesn’t care about the Iranian people, who face a devastating combination of economic, political and environmental crises brought about partly by their repressive, corrupt and incompetent government and partly by the punishing sanctions enacted by America and its allies. Indeed, that should be axiomatic, since Trump doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his understanding of world affairs seems to derive from bits and pieces of his early-’60s prep-school history curriculum.