In stark contrast to the unprincipled reactions of both Barack Obama and Old Joe Biden when the Iranian people took to the streets in previous years to protest against the bloodthirsty mullahs of the Islamic Republic, President Donald Trump didn’t hesitate to remark on the unrest in Iran on Monday, and to declare his support for the courageous Iranians who are putting their lives on the line for freedom after enduring 46 years of tyranny.
Trump made it clear that he was “not going to talk about overthrow of a regime.” He also made clear, however, that the nationwide demonstrations that have once again engulfed Iran have ample justification. “They’ve got tremendous inflation,” the president observed. “Their economy is busted, the economy is no good.”
Trump also noted the brutality of Iran’s Islamic regime, pointing out that “every time they have a riot or somebody forms a group, little or big, they start shooting people. You know, they kill people. All of a sudden people start getting shot and that group disbanded pretty quickly.”
Trump noted correctly that this was the Islamic Republic’s longstanding practice: “I’ve watched this for years — there is tremendous discontent. I’ve watched it for years, and vicious, vicious people.”
Meanwhile, Mike Walz, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, left no ambiguity about where the nation stands regarding the latest round of protests in Iran, writing: “The people of Iran want freedom. We stand with Iranians in the streets of Tehran and across the country as they protest a radical regime that has brought them nothing but economic downturn and war.” The State Department’s Farsi account on X added that the U.S. stands with the Iranian people’s attempt “to make their voices heard.”
A regime that is as severely threatened as the Islamic Republic is now can lash out with lethal force, and Trump also made it clear when he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday that the mullahs should not assume that they can lash out without facing the consequences of doing so, as they did so often during the Obama and Biden years. “Now I hear that Iran is trying to build up again,” Trump said, “and if they are, we’re going to have to knock them down. We’ll knock the hell out of them.”
Referring to Israel, Trump added: “We just won a big war together. If we didn’t beat Iran, you wouldn’t have had peace in the Middle East. We wiped it out.” Asked if he would join Israel in striking Iran again if the mullahs resumed their aggressive activities, Trump responded readily: “If they continue with the missiles — yes. The nuclear — absolutely…. Speaking of Iran, I hope they’re not trying to build up again, because if they are, we’re going to have no choice but very quickly to eradicate that buildup.”
The contrast with the last two Democrat administrations was stark. The Biden regime sent $10 billion to the “Death to America”-chanting mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran in March 2024, five months after the Iran-financed Hamas jihad massacre of 1,200 Israelis, and a year and a half after Iranian morality police arrested a young woman, Mahsa Amini, for wearing her hijab improperly, only for her to die in custody under suspicious circumstances.
Related: Islamic Republic of Iran Says It’s In a ‘Total War’ Not Just with Israel Alone
For his part, Barack Obama maintained a studied silence during the 2009 Green Movement protests in Iran, even to the point that protesters chanted “Obama, Obama — either with us, or with them!” Michael Oren, who at that time was the Israeli ambassador to the US at the time, said, according to the Jerusalem Post, that Obama “initially claimed he would not support the protesters because the CIA helped overthrow nationalist Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and that he wanted to show the Iranian people that he respected their sovereignty.” Also, “Oren said the Obama administration had told Israelis behind the scenes that the protesters themselves did not want an American endorsement because it could discredit them in the eyes of the Iranian people.”
Oren was skeptical, observing in 2018 that “in retrospect, those explanations are less credible. The Obama administration’s lack of support for the Green Revolution was part of a pattern in which it did not hold Iran accountable for any provocation. It would seem it was part of a general approach that began in Obama’s first week in office in 2009 of wanting to reach a deal with Iran at pretty much any cost.”
The present administration is, as Kamala Harris would say, unencumbered by what has been. And that’s a very good thing, both for the Iranian people and those of the United States.
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