Minneapolis and Tehran: Is this Donald Trump’s downfall?

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 “normie” consumers are no longer kidding themselves. If that sounds a little too much like Jean-Paul Marat 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.

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

President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”

He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”

No one outside the Trump cult could miss the resonance here, and I don’t think the Trump cultists did either. Although the specific events occurring in Iran and Minnesota, and their social and political contexts, “are different and complicated,” 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.

To belabor the obvious, Trump doesn’t remotely understand what’s happening in Iran and doesn’t 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’t care about anyone but himself and his understanding of world affairs seems to derive from bits and pieces of his early-’60s prep-school history curriculum. In his Gollum-like understanding of reality, Iran’s 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 “Great Game.”

It’s also true, of course, that Trump views Venezuela, Greenland, Gaza, Ukraine 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 “transactional” thinking of a hard-headed businessman. Setting aside the regime propagandists at Fox News, very few have parroted the insulting narrative that Trump wants to bring “democracy” to Tehran, or that some imaginary and painless form of U.S. military intervention might produce that outcome.

Even decaf-MAGA outfits like Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and Bari Weiss’ CBS News have struggled to make sense of the administration’s constantly shifting Iran policy, which largely amounts to social-media posturing mixed with wishful thinking. Trump’s foreign-policy inner circle (which mostly means Stephen Miller, with a bit of Li’l 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’s dunghill.

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’t 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’s lies can become Tuesday’s sacred truths.

Or it’s even dumber than that, as well as darker: Those Americans who are in the streets to protest paramilitary rule and ethnic cleansing in Minneapolis — an event, as Jamelle Bouie writes, with no clear parallel in American history since the British military occupation of Boston during the Revolutionary War — 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.

Turning the tragedy and chaos in Iran into pro-Trump melodrama, however — 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 — 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’t afford to inspect too closely.

That’s 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’re supposed to remember how that turned out, although we are in constant danger of forgetting it, and we’re also supposed to believe that a major source of Trump’s appeal to embittered voters, and a foundational element of MAGA doctrine, was his vow to avoid all such foreign entanglements.

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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’s roughly one sleepless night away from declaring war against a NATO ally.

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’s 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’m entirely serious.) We can hope that Trump’s longstanding dream of building a new American empire on the cheap — that’s his foreign policy in a nutshell — will crumble when faced with the true price of such monumental folly, which is too high for any of us to calculate.