Cartoon by Matt Davies

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

By ANDREW O'HEHIR
Executive Editor

Salon: 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.

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 >>>