President Donald Trump’s promise that “help is on its way” for anti-government protesters in Iran appears to be increasingly at odds with realities on the ground, and the administration’s desire for an easy foreign policy win — or regime change in Tehran — remains elusive.
As large-scale protests have gained momentum in Iran amid a near-total information blackout, fragmentary evidence indicates the demonstrations have been crushed in a bloody crackdown by Iran’s security forces.
“The low estimate for the number of people killed is 2,000. The high estimate today [Jan. 14] is 15,000,” says Farzan Sabet, a researcher focused on the Middle East at the Global Governance Center, who runs the blog Iran Wonk. “They’re also lining up to do mass executions.”
Amid rumors that American military strikes were imminent, Trump told journalists Wednesday that “We have been informed by very important sources on the other side that the killing has stopped and executions won’t take place,” later adding: “I hope it’s true. Who knows.”
Whether this means the U.S. has ruled out military action for now is unclear. Unpredictability is a feature, not a bug, of this administration’s foreign policy. Trump previously pulled a bait-and-switch on Iran in June last year, promising a week-long window for diplomacy, only to carry out “Operation Midnight Hammer” against the country’s nuclear program hours later.
The protests, which began weeks ago over deteriorating living conditions and economic hardship, grew in size after outside voices endorsed the demonstrations.
On Jan. 6, Reza Pahlavi — the son of the former shah of Iran, who lives in the United States as a dissident-in-exile — released an Instagram post declaring his support for the protests. “Despite the regime’s ongoing violent crackdown, you are resisting, and it is inspiring,” Pahlavi said, calling on demonstrators to gather on the following Thursday and Friday and start chanting at 8pm. “Based on your response, I will announce the next calls to action.”
The video electrified many Iranians.
“I started getting messages, both from people inside Iran and also students who have family who are from Iran, or are here with family. And they were like, ‘Did you see this video? It’s got 15 million views.’ I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll go check it later,’” Sabet tells Rolling Stone. “When I checked later, it was at 80 million views.”
By Thursday, the regime cut internet and phone services across the country. Protesters who had originally been motivated by high inflation were now taking to the streets across Iran chanting “Jâvid Shâh,” or “Long live the Shah,” and “Death to Khamenei,” the most significant direct challenge to the legitimacy of clerical rule in decades.
Trump’s social media post on Jan. 2 promising to take action if protesters were harmed also encouraged turnout. “I think that was a big deal. And his capture of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro reiterated the credibility of President Trump’s words,” Sabet says.
By the weekend, the regime had unleashed the army, police, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — the military branch charged with the protection of Iran’s government — as well as its volunteer paramilitaries, known as Basij.
Handfuls of photos and video clips have leaked out via Starlink satellite-internet terminals or have been hand-carried into neighboring countries. They document heavy and sustained gunfire in city streets, security forces firing on protesters, and rows upon rows of body bags.
“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” Trump wrote on Tuesday, Jan. 13, after thousands had already been killed.
Yet the military assets required for a U.S. intervention aimed at stopping Iran’s security apparatus were simply not available in the area when Trump first made his pledge in early January. There are no carrier strike groups currently within operational distance of Iran, and until early Wednesday there had been no significant build-up of American forces in the region. Open-source researchers observed multiple aerial refuelling aircraft taking to the sky Wednesday, a possible indication of military action.
“Some of the messages I’ve been hearing from Iran is a sense of betrayal by President Trump,” Sabet says. “They thought they were going out there with him behind their backs.”
It is an open question what Washington expects to accomplish with the resources on hand. Administration insiders previously told the press that the White House is considering a range of non-kinetic options, including boosting anti-government media online, attacking Iranian targets with cyberweapons, or increasing sanctions, as well as limited military strikes aimed at critical targets.
The U.S. does maintain a number of fighter aircraft and naval vessels in the region — notably at Al-Udeid Airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain — which are capable of launching cruise-missile and stand-off munitions strikes. But destroying Iran’s security forces, dismantling its political and military leadership, and bringing down the regime will likely require a significant commitment in military resources.
“It’s not a one-off,” says Victoria Taylor, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran. “Any effort to bring the regime down through military force would require what is best described as a sustained campaign.”
It’s not clear whether Trump is willing to commit to such an action.
“One of the challenges within the administration is there are very different camps in terms of a willingness and readiness to use force,” Taylor says. “Clearly, there are hawkish elements within the administration who are ready to pursue a much more muscular foreign policy — I’d count Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio among those. But we also know that there are strong voices in favor of restraint, like Vice President [J.D.] Vance.”
Amid the lack of a clearly articulated goal or strategy for Iran, some experts are skeptical Washington can achieve its desired results.
“There is no violent shortcut to an outcome where the United States and Israel will be happy,” says Ali Vaez, the Iran program director at the International Crisis Group. He observes that while Trump could use non-kinetic options to escalate pressure on the regime, “they won’t check the box of ‘spectacular’ it seems he so often opts for, and might not produce a significant result.”
A series of limited strikes, similar to the airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear program last summer, may give Trump a PR victory. But they are unlikely to destroy the regime or protect the lives of protesters.
“There’s certainly a risk that the lesson learned from Venezuela and from the 12-Day War [when Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran in June 2025] is that U.S. military power is so overwhelming that we are capable of achieving our goals quickly without putting boots on the ground, and without casualties,” Taylor says. “The difficulty in Iran is really that even if the U.S. were able to topple the regime, I am skeptical that we will be able to control the follow-on to a desired outcome.”
Nevertheless, the protests and the crackdown indicate structural weakness in the Iranian regime, which has portrayed the strife as part of a plot coordinated by Israel. But the sheer scale of the protests belies that they are simply the work of foreign agents. Significant protests in the past which began over social or economic grievances have spiraled into direct challenges to the government, known as “the System” in Persian, which is viewed as oppressive and backwards by many young Iranians.
“The regime is able to suppress, but it is not able to address the underlying causes,” Vaez says. “So all it’s doing is buying time until the next round of confrontation with civil society, and these are becoming more frequent and more violent every time.”
Sabet sees the current crisis as part of a much larger pattern, whose threads can be traced back through nearly a decade of internal protests and crackdowns. “The underlying assumption for me is a trend line where people understand that this system can’t meet their needs,” he says.
“Why are people constantly coming into the streets and killing security forces, and getting killed in huge numbers? Why is there a mass murder happening in the streets right now if reform works?” he asks.
The reason that Pahlavi’s post went viral and added fuel to the flames of protest, Sabet says, was revealed in conversations he had with acquaintances: “They were like, ‘Yeah, listen, we didn’t have an alternative before. Here’s an alternative, right?’ At least it’s trying to provide a vision of some kind of a positive future, or hope for the future.”
Still, the influence of Pahlavi — and Trump — is limited.
“Although the stock of the former shah’s son has improved over the past few months, he is by no means universally seen as the opposition leader,” Vaez notes. “And in any case, he doesn’t have any ground organization.”
Sabet adds: “If there’s a year of mass executions and crackdowns, it might be enough to put a stake in Pahlavi’s ambitions.” Still, while it’s hard to see the U.S. bringing down the regime quickly, Sabet says “a few well-considered actions on the cyber and non-kinetic side, or also on the kinetic and military side, could have an enormous effect” in encouraging another cycle of protest. “This situation is so unstable and fluid that nothing would surprise me.”
Vaez simply does not see the U.S. determining the final outcome for the regime that has ruled a country of 92 million people for nearly 60 years.
“This is an Iranian affair. Outsiders are mere bystanders,” he says.
Nevertheless, Trump views his previous military adventures in Iran — the killing of IRGC commander Major General Qasem Soleimani in 2020 and the strike against Tehran’s nuclear program last year — as unequivocal successes, and “bystander” is rarely a role he embraces.
We Are Witnessing the Imperial Presidency on Steroids
During the last period of his time as president, while the Watergate scandal was raging, Richard Nixon allegedly told several U.S. representatives that he could get on the telephone, issue an order, and soon after millions of people would be killed. It wasn’t hyperbole. There are very few people in human history that have ever had that kind of power, and most have been American presidents. But how does one individual with this sort of authority exist in a system of government designed with a triad of co-equal branches set up specifically to thwart concentrated executive power, a system where starting a war wasn’t even an executive-branch power in the constitutional design?
The question of what in our system could have prevented Nixon from causing a nuclear holocaust if he wanted to has been left unanswered. There have been rumors that Cabinet secretaries at the time were telling aides to ignore such a presidential order if it were issued, but that’s a stop-gap measure, not a constitutional check. The designers of our republican system never intended their chief executive to have this sort of authority. The fact that presidents do today is the root cause of many of our national problems.
Americans are living though a historic moment right now, one that would be fascinating to watch were it not so insanely important. There is a disaster looming that is becoming more clear every day. The cause is that the office of the president of the United States has far too much power and very few constraints. This combination invites authoritarianism. All it needs to become manifest is someone in the White House who desires such an outcome. It seems we have someone like that now.
While it’s both tempting and normal to see current conditions as the result of recent events, the 21st-century American political situation is the culmination of decades of trends involving the ever-increasing power of the presidency. None of this is hidden, and scholars have been writing about it for decades (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s famous book The Imperial Presidency was published in 1973). And while the aggregation of presidential power is often cloaked in rationales and justifications, from anti-communism to anti-drugs, war powers, anti-terrorism, et cetera, sometimes it’s simply how things developed and evolved (the nature and challenges associated with nuclear weapons is an example). But there is no denying at this point that we have created a systemic monster that the constitutional framers wouldn’t recognize — and one they would fear. The founders believed in diffused power and oversight. They believed in a strong and active legislative branch to counter autocratic mission creep. We have none of those things at the moment. Are any of them recoverable? Is constitutional erosion a one-way street, or can it be reversed with some sort of renaissance? Must we go the way of Rome’s Republic?
To rebalance our constitutional portfolio first requires us to want a less powerful executive. This is somewhat counterintuitive. Americans are accustomed to electing leaders who promise to push for outcomes, foster positive change, fix things, and help people. The voters expect the president to use the power of the office to achieve what the people want. The pressure from the winning candidate’s supporters is not to restrain power but to use as much of it as possible. We are addicted to the exercise of presidential authority as long as it is being used for ends we desire. The effect this has on the system as a whole is given little attention. Is it even conceivable that we might push for leaders to restrain or roll back whatever power they might claim in order to prevent us from getting a president with too much authority? What if that’s the only way to repair things?
If we come out of this current inflection point constitutionally intact — and that’s far from guaranteed — we should use any pendulum-swinging momentum for reform the way legislators used the Watergate scandal aftermath to try to rein in the runaway powers of the presidency. There were lots of hearings, investigations, and legal alterations done in the mid-1970s to “fix” things, along with punishments meted out to those in government who knowingly went too far. This seems healthy for any system when its constitutional flaws are exposed. But like a noxious weed, the growth of executive power returned with a vengeance starting in the 1980s. Many of the post-Watergate reforms were challenged, overruled, or functionally eviscerated. The rationale given was that the “legitimate” powers of the presidency had been encroached upon. The formerly fringe concept of the Unitary Executive Theory emerged as a justification for unilateral actions and presidential power consolidation, pushed by think tanks (and the Supreme Court justices they pushed for) and entities who wanted less interference from other branches of government. This is the same rationale Donald Trump and his surrogates cite continually.
Any effort to dial back presidential authority faces strong headwinds in our current political climate. The Supreme Court seems hell-bent on ceding ever more power to the president, one who has far more power now than the “imperial” Nixon did back in the early 1970s. The electorate has demonstrated that it’s willing to support chief executives pushing constitutional boundaries if it’s done for reasons voters favor. And neither party wants to unilaterally disarm by ceding authority if the other side can’t be trusted to do the same. Any salvation coming from the legislative branch seems hopeless. This dynamic is decades in the making; Congress has grown weak, venal, co-opted, and seems happy to relinquish its power to avoid responsibility for anything that might hurt members’ reelections. Frustration with Congress leads to even more temptation to use presidents to achieve political goals — often using executive orders — that lawmakers seem unable or unwilling to pursue. The dynamic isn’t favorable.
But we have been given another reminder of why any of those good reasons for increasing the power of one human being at the expense of the rest of the government aren’t good enough. The executive branch is the one overwhelmingly likely to bring us to a dictatorship, and we can now see how much the vast powers of the office have only been held in check by mere protocol. A president unleashed shows us the power of the modern office uncloaked. And it should scare us all back into the mindset of Ben Franklin when he said that we had “a republic, if you can keep it.” Congress, with its many members, isn’t likely to be the branch that takes democracy away from us. The danger comes from the executive branch where one person calls the shots. And as it was when Nixon fell, we are being reminded that increasingly powerful presidents are something the system seems to germinate naturally. We need to periodically prune back the executive’s powers when the opportunity presents itself. That time must be soon. The weeds have overrun the garden.
Too many forget that the primary goal of the U.S. constitutional design wasn’t efficient governing. It was tyrant prevention. We put up with all sorts of impediments to change, reform, and improvement for that one simple goal. Whether this firewall still works is the paramount political question of our age. Will this era turn out to be a blip on the timeline? A warning that prompts reflection, reform, and recalibration akin to the McCarthyistic “Red Scare” era? Or will it be a Caesar crossing the Rubicon moment that forever ends the American experiment?
The more scary aspect of all this is the degree of public support for an uber-powerful leader who champions their views and pushes for what they desire. Often these wishes are unachievable because our constitutional protections stand in the way. This is a problem that will outlive the current president and requires deep national introspection. We could start by reminding ourselves what happens when representative systems go sideways. The outcomes are not recalled fondly by those who lived through them. Better to acquire that lesson from some other nation’s tragedy rather than having to learn about the danger of historical hot stoves by touching one ourselves.
We are currently seeing what can happen when the only branch controlled by a single individual decides it wants to flex its vast and awesome powers. It demonstrates to all reasonable people that it’s too much power for one person to have. Imagining such authority in the hands of one’s worst enemy should be enough to make this concern clear to anyone. The president can pick up the phone and order the deaths of billions and the ruination of the planet’s ecosystem. That’s clearly too much power for any human being, isn’t it?