"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.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.