"Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled [sic] all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”
It’s hard to see this Truth Social post by the president on Tuesday and make sense of, well, anything right now.
Iranian civilians have been protesting in the streets for weeks, in an effort to express their frustration with a bruising economy, an inflation rate greater than 40%, food shortages, and rolling blackouts. In response, the Islamic Republic has opened fire on its own people, killing anywhere from 2,400 to as many as 20,000 people in just two weeks.
The situation is dire — there are reports that doctors and aid groups cannot keep up with the amount of injuries they are seeing, and that the regime will start publicly executing protesters, including 26-year-old Erfan Soltani, whose judicial proceedings were “fast-tracked” in just two days.
Trump is vowing “very strong action” if Iran follows through with those threats to execute Soltani and others, action which could include everything from sanctions to strikes on military installations to cyberattacks.
It’s hard to reconcile this Trump — rescuer of the oppressed, defender of democracy — with the other one who’s simultaneously threatening his own citizens for protesting his immigration policies.
In the wake of an ICE officer shooting and killing an unarmed Minneapolis mother, Trump and his cabinet have been defiant. They’ve largely refused to offer even a modicum of sympathy for Renee Good. Instead, Trump has suggested her “highly disrespectful” attitude may have justified her death. Vice President JD Vance decided immediately that she was to blame. “What I am certain of is that she violated the law,” he said. He called Good, who leaves behind three children, “a deranged leftist who tried to run [the officer] over.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem accused Good of “an act of domestic terrorism” just hours after her death, despite no one having conducted any investigation of the incident yet.
The administration, furthermore, strategically boxed out Minnesota law enforcement from joining a federal investigation of the shooting, and now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche says there’s “currently no basis for a criminal civil rights investigation” of any kind.
The irony of Trump’s pro-democracy message to Iranians and his decidedly despotic message to Americans should be lost on no one, nor should the parallels.
That Iranian leaders are calling their protesters “rioters” and “terrorists” while Trump officials are using the same language against Americans is chilling.
That Iran is jailing and “fast-tracking” the due process of protesters while Trump officials immediately decided the ICE officer who killed Good was innocent, and not even worth investigating, is deeply disturbing.
That Iran is threatening to execute protesters while masked ICE agents in unmarked vehicles have also threatened to kill protesters and have already used deadly force against them, is terrifying. At least one agent was recorded asking a protester, “Did you not learn from what just happened?”
Understandably, Americans are alarmed. And they should be.
According to a new SSRS/CNN poll, Trump’s anti-immigration efforts in Minnesota and elsewhere are not popular.
Fifty-eight percent of Americans disapprove of the way Trump is handling immigration.
Fifty-one percent say ICE’s actions are making cities feel less safe, versus just 31% who say more safe.
Forty-seven percent say they are more concerned that the government will go too far in cracking down on protesters versus 37% who say they’re more concerned the protests will get out of control.
Fifty-six percent say the use of force against Renee Good was inappropriate, versus just 26% who say it was appropriate.
While a majority of voters may have been with Trump on the need to lower crime and curtail illegal immigration, it’s hard to imagine any wanting to see our cities militarized to the point where they feel unsafe, where they fear protesting could get them killed, where it’s totally possible they could be rounded up without due process, where there are eerie parallels to what’s happening in Iran, a theocratic dictatorship.
While ICE agents have their proverbial boots on the necks of American citizens, Trump is unironically promising to defend democracy a world away. But it’s hard to maintain the moral high ground and wag your finger at Iran when you’re stomping all over democratic freedoms here at home.
It’s a perplexing and alarming place to be for a country that was once considered a beacon of freedom, a shining city on a hill. And with every threat to American democracy Trump issues, he weakens our nation.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.