{"id":3524,"date":"2026-03-04T18:47:01","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T18:47:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/3524\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T18:47:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T18:47:01","slug":"why-trump-supports-protesters-in-tehran-but-not-in-minneapolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/3524\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Trump Supports Protesters in Tehran but Not in Minneapolis"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against undocumented migrants and, more and more, against protesters and ordinary citizens. It also makes plain the hypocrisy in Trump\u2019s embrace of the Iranian opposition. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei\u2019s government has denounced the protesters it has killed, calling them terrorists; the Trump Administration has said that Renee Good<\/a>, the woman shot dead by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, was engaging in an act of \u201cdomestic terrorism.\u201d If the scenes in the Twin Cities look like those from an overseas occupation, the historian Nikhil Pal Singh suggested in the magazine Equator this week, that is because, under this Administration, the foreign and the domestic realms have bled together, as Trump threatens war-time powers \u201cto arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants\u2014and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.\u201d The Administration is asserting, too, an almost colonial kind of impunity: last week, Vice-President J. D. Vance<\/a> baldly asserted that ICE agents have \u201cabsolute immunity\u201d from local prosecution for their activities in Minnesota.<\/p>\n

Even so, although the President\u2019s intrinsic sympathies are with strongmen\u2014Putin, Orb\u00e1n, Kim\u2014his strategic interests in Iran are with the protesters. (As it happens, the Administration\u2019s old allies in Israel and its newer ones in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states all want the Iranian theocrats gone.) On social media, the President made some gestures of solidarity. \u201ckeep protesting,\u201d he urged. \u201chelp is on the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Exactly what kind of help remains unclear. Trump\u2019s adviser Steve Witkoff met with Reza Pahlavi, once the crown prince of Iran, but the White House found the deposed royal unconvincing. \u201cHe seems very nice, but I don\u2019t know how he\u2019d play within his own country,\u201d Trump told reporters. In posts and appearances, the President returned to more familiar themes: he mused about possible military strikes on strategic sites in Iran, threatened tariffs against countries that trade with it, and announced a little bit of progress\u2014the Iranian government had apparently reversed a plan to execute Erfan Soltani, a twenty-six-year-old shop owner who was arrested in connection with the protests. \u201cWe\u2019ve been told the killing is stopping,\u201d Trump said on Wednesday afternoon, and then, somewhat tellingly, struggled with his verb tenses. \u201cIt has stopped. It is stopping.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Iran, the despotic regime is fragile and desperate, and, as Merz suggests, it may soon fall. But it may also survive, by means of violent repression, and by Thursday the news from Tehran had quieted. Sounds of gunfire had faded; there were no new bonfires. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States and its allies had maintained a system of humanitarian interventionism, until the President so delightedly detonated it. \u201cIn the first year of his administration,\u201d the Times noted last week, Trump \u201cdismantled the instruments of soft power\u2014such as Voice of America and the State Department unit that dropped internet capability into Iran\u2014that were key to democracy promotion.\u201d What he is left with are his threats and a hollow sort of exhortation that borrows from the same program of humanitarian interventionism that he has so explicitly disavowed. \u201cIran is looking at freedom,\u201d Trump wrote on Truth Social, \u201cperhaps like never before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps. The President\u2019s statements of allegiance\u2014and, potentially, the internet that Elon Musk<\/a> has offered to make available for free via Starlink\u2014may well strengthen the resolve of the Iranian opposition. But Trump\u2019s domestic acts, in a countervailing way, may embolden the regime. Cynicism travels, too. Right now, he is faced with a mass protest in Minneapolis against a government show of power that is growing increasingly unpopular, and his reaction has been to double down: on Thursday, he threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act and send federal troops to the upper Midwest.<\/p>\n

What supplies all these events with a sense of approaching a precipice is the open contestation between pro- and anti-democratic forces, happening both here and abroad, in view of each other. Through the partial curtain between the two societies, we are watching what is happening in Iran. And Iran, surely, is watching us.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an encompassing vision, one that is now playing out in the ICE campaign in Minnesota against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2618,34,503,2620,69,2619],"class_list":{"0":"post-3524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tehran","8":"tag-comment","9":"tag-iran","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","12":"tag-tehran","13":"tag-the-lede"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116172400099510060","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}