For nearly two months now, the Iranian people have bravely taken to the streets to call for the overthrow of their totalitarian masters, facing down harsh, violent repression in the process. These demonstrations have been large-scale and nationwide, stemming from myriad factors that are not easily addressed by the regime. They have also come at a time when the status of the government in Tehran has never been lower. The movement has already eclipsed the most serious recent rounds of protest in both size and anti-regime fervor. But the mullahcracy’s response has been just as severe. Credible sources have placed the number of dead in the regime’s crackdown at over 30,000, with many more imprisoned or otherwise disappeared. This death toll dwarfs previous cycles of repression. To put it simply, the mullahcracy is trying to kill its way out of these protests. And it seems to be working.
Enter Donald Trump. The president has been a vocal supporter of these protests, bucking his predecessors Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who had tepid, if any, words of encouragement for the demonstrations under their watch. On the contrary, Trump has not only said forthrightly that America stands with the Iranian people, he has explicitly threatened the regime if they did not stand down and halt the killing. His Truth Social posts have suggested that “help is on the way” and that the regime would “pay a big price” for any further killing of protesters. For weeks, the administration waffled on these promises, engaging in furious rounds of negotiation with the Iranian regime over its nuclear weapons ambitions while that same regime murdered its people with impunity. At the same time, American military assets were surged to the region in numbers that have not been seen in years. Now, those negotiations have collapsed — unsurprisingly, given the mullahcracy’s intransigence — and the White House has shifted to a far more forceful approach.
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