Minneapolis and Tehran: Is this Donald Trump's downfall? [View all]

[marmar]

Minneapolis and Tehran: Is this Donald Trump’s downfall?
Trump hopes the Iran protests can save his presidency — while he crushes protest at home. It won't work

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published January 18, 2026 9:00AM (EST)


(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.

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!”

....(snip)....

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.

....(snip)....

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. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/18/minneapolis-and-tehran-is-this-donald-trumps-downfall/