{"id":416347,"date":"2026-01-19T07:17:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-19T07:17:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/416347\/"},"modified":"2026-01-19T07:17:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T07:17:13","slug":"minneapolis-and-tehran-is-this-donald-trumps-downfall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/416347\/","title":{"rendered":"Minneapolis and Tehran: Is this Donald Trump’s downfall?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cnormie\u201d consumers are no longer kidding themselves. If that sounds a little too much like Jean-Paul Marat<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump<\/a> 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<\/a> and then, about an hour later, about the street protests against the federal invasion or occupation of Minneapolis<\/a>. 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> \u2014 a reporter previously derided by leftists as a regime-friendly stenographer \u2014 noted in acrid detail.<\/p>\n

President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. \u201cKEEP PROTESTING \u2013 TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!\u201d he wrote on social media<\/a>. He decried \u201cthe senseless killing of protesters,\u201d and added that those pulling the triggers \u201cwill pay a big price.\u201d<\/p>\n

He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier<\/a>, were \u201canarchists and professional agitators\u201d trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that \u201cTHE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!\u201d<\/p>\n

No one outside the Trump cult could miss the resonance here, and I don\u2019t think the Trump cultists did either. Although the specific events occurring in Iran and Minnesota, and their social and political contexts, \u201care different and complicated,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

To belabor the obvious, Trump doesn\u2019t remotely understand what\u2019s happening in Iran and doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t care about anyone but himself and his understanding of world affairs seems to derive from bits and pieces of his early-\u201960s prep-school history curriculum. In his Gollum-like understanding of reality, Iran\u2019s theocratic regime, along with its diverse and divided population of 93 million people, exist only as potential instruments of his political survival, or as chessboard pieces in a third-rate remake of the 19th-century imperialist \u201cGreat Game.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

It\u2019s also true, of course, that Trump views Venezuela<\/a>, Greenland<\/a>, Gaza<\/a>, Ukraine<\/a> and lots of other places through the same distorted prism, perceiving nothing in the outside world except the shards of his damaged ego. But at least mainstream journalists have mostly stopped making excuses for that, or framing it as the \u201ctransactional\u201d thinking of a hard-headed businessman. Setting aside the regime propagandists at Fox News<\/a>, very few have parroted the insulting narrative that Trump wants to bring \u201cdemocracy\u201d to Tehran, or that some imaginary and painless form of U.S. military intervention might produce that outcome.<\/p>\n

Setting aside the regime propagandists at Fox News, few journalists have parroted the insulting narrative that Trump wants to bring \u201cdemocracy\u201d to Tehran, or that some painless U.S. military intervention might produce that outcome.<\/p>\n

Even decaf-MAGA outfits like Jeff Bezos\u2019 Washington Post and Bari Weiss\u2019 CBS News<\/a> have struggled to make sense of the administration\u2019s constantly shifting Iran policy, which largely amounts to social-media posturing mixed with wishful thinking. Trump\u2019s foreign-policy inner circle (which mostly means Stephen Miller<\/a>, with a bit of Li\u2019l Marco on the side) openly yearn for a Venezuela-type lightning strike that might decapitate the Iranian regime, but are not quite delusional enough to risk the kind of disastrous overseas war that might consign the entire MAGA agenda to history\u2019s dunghill.<\/p>\n

For Trumpian true believers, the resemblance between the protests in Minneapolis and Tehran causes no cognitive dissonance because all possible forms of contradiction and negative information are already baked in. We don\u2019t need Hannah Arendt or George Orwell to tell us that for a personalist autocratic regime, reality is whatever the leader says it is, and Monday\u2019s lies can become Tuesday\u2019s sacred truths.<\/p>\n

Or it\u2019s even dumber than that, as well as darker: Those Americans who are in the streets to protest paramilitary rule and ethnic cleansing in Minneapolis \u2014 an event, as Jamelle Bouie writes<\/a>, with no clear parallel in American history since the British military occupation of Boston during the Revolutionary War \u2014 are no longer real Americans at all, in the MAGA alternate universe. By opposing the Trump regime and, more to the point, by exposing the blatantly anti-American cynicism and hypocrisy of its entire project, they have exiled themselves from the imagined community it has worked so hard to create.<\/p>\n

Turning the tragedy and chaos in Iran into pro-Trump melodrama, however \u2014 while ignoring the obvious conclusion that the Trump regime has far more in common with the theocrats in Tehran than with any strand of Iranian popular resistance \u2014 is a more challenging task. It requires a convoluted and threadbare extension of the MAGA narrative that is completely untethered to reality, and which the president and his supporters can\u2019t afford to inspect too closely.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because the only shreds of truth behind that fiction lie in the longtime alliance between wealthy Iranian expats and the supposedly discredited neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, which dreamed for decades of using the conquest of Iraq and Afghanistan as a beachhead for regime change in Iran. We\u2019re supposed to remember how that turned out, although we are in constant danger of forgetting it, and we\u2019re also supposed to believe that a major source of Trump\u2019s appeal to embittered voters, and a foundational element of MAGA doctrine, was his vow to avoid all such foreign entanglements.<\/p>\n

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter<\/a>, Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump is cornered, angry, visibly failing and losing control of his own coalition. He also holds effectively full power over the United States government for at least one more year. There is no way to exaggerate the danger of this moment. Trump has already declared a piecemeal civil war against the major cities of his own country, a national emergency that will certainly get worse before it gets better, and he\u2019s roughly one sleepless night away from declaring war against a NATO ally.<\/p>\n

But those implausible sci-fi scenarios, believe it or not, are nowhere near the worst-case possibilities. We can hope that heightened media scrutiny, mounting public opposition and Trump\u2019s animal instinct for self-preservation will fend off another catastrophe in the Middle East. We can hope that Vladimir Putin, principal global supporter of the Iranian regime, gives Trump a friendly call, with undertones of come-to-Jesus. (I\u2019m entirely serious.) We can hope that Trump\u2019s longstanding dream of building a new American empire on the cheap \u2014 that\u2019s his foreign policy in a nutshell \u2014 will crumble when faced with the true price of such monumental folly, which is too high for any of us to calculate.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

from Andrew O\u2019Hehir<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If there are visible signs of light amid this dark winter in America, they emanate from two obvious…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":416348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-416347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}