Trump Sides with Iran’s Dissidents

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 02, 2026

 

Events inside Iran have progressed rapidly since I wrote about them on Tuesday, just two days after a new wave of anti-government demonstrations erupted on the streets of Iran’s major cities.

 

Indeed, to call this outpouring of hostility toward the mullahs a “protest” movement would be to downplay its significance.

 

That doesn’t look like an expression of political dissent that can be mollified through dialogue with the clerical establishment. The speed with which the demonstrations evolved into an outright insurrection justifies the fear that gripped the Iranian political class at the unrest’s outset.

 

Today, President Donald Trump acknowledged the growing crisis inside Iran, and he sided definitively with the anti-establishment forces in the streets.

 

“If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” read a presidential note posted to social media. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go.”

 

No one knows what that means. Iranian security forces are already deploying force against the country’s dissidents — some of it lethal. The Iranian regime has not acknowledged the civilian deaths that human rights groups have highlighted at the hands of security forces, but it has noted that at least one member of the hated Basij militia was killed during a crowd suppression operation. That suggests the demonstrators are giving as good as they’re getting.

 

Those who were seduced by the notion that “peace through strength” compels America to retreat from the world stage lamented the president’s commitment to support the aspirations of freedom-loving Iranians — as though that support manifests solely in bombs and bullets. Yet, as the Wall Street Journal’s editors observed, facilitating the efforts from average Iranians to take their country back can take many forms.

 

It “can mean restoring internet access when the regime cuts it off, unmasking regime thugs, and much more,” the Journal observed. Trump could implement congressional legislation holding Iranian officials accountable for their human rights abuses. The president might even enforce sanctions targeting Iran’s energy sector “with even half the vigor the U.S. has lately displayed against Venezuela.”

 

Those inside the president’s orbit who fear the unintended consequences of U.S. action more than those that flow from American lethargy are, as ever, trepidatious. That fear often prompts prudential thinkers to tacitly endorse the devil they know. But the United States is not and should not be invested in the preservation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

For nearly a half century, the regime in Tehran has hunted and killed Americans. It has sidled up alongside every anti-American regime on earth, frustrating Washington’s initiatives along the way. The mullahs have carried out assassination plots on American soil, sponsored the destabilizing activities of anti-American activists inside the country, and exported state-sponsored terrorism across the globe. The collapse of this regime at the hands of its oppressed people would usher in an era of uncertainty, but it would be an era in which the unique malevolence of the Iranian theocracy has passed into history.

 

Fortunately, the president is confident enough to take America’s side in a fight, and in the process he is rectifying Barack Obama’s admitted mistakes. Perhaps this uprising will be brutally crushed, just as the many that preceded this moment were. The mullahs, though, should not have an easy go of it.

 

The desperate hardships that forced Iranians into the streets are the result of maladministration as much as they are the intended consequences of the crippling sanctions America and its allies have imposed on the regime in Tehran. The ongoing events in Iran today are the logical consequence of those policies. America should have the stomach to see its own policy preferences through to fruition.