Donald Trump cannot tolerate events that don’t revolve around him. Even as president of the United States, he is incapable of letting history unfold without forcing himself into the center of it—loudly, crudely, and without understanding the consequences. Every crisis becomes a stage. Every tragedy becomes an opportunity for self-promotion.
That impulse is now colliding with one of the most dangerous moments in Iran’s modern history.
Millions of Iranians are risking their lives to challenge a brutal, widely hated regime that has responded with mass arrests, torture, and murder. Thousands have been killed. Countless others have been beaten, imprisoned, or disappeared. The government is not wobbling because of foreign pressure; it is clinging to power by shooting its own people in the streets.
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In a sane world, a U.S. president would understand that this is not about him. He would offer careful words of solidarity, express support for the protesters, and avoid becoming part of the story. But that is not how Trump operates.
Over the past several days, Trump has repeatedly threatened Iran with “strong” and “very strong” military action if the regime continued its violent crackdown. When Iran announced plans to execute detained protesters, Trump warned of consequences. He told protesters directly that “help is on the way.”
The first threat was ignored. The killing continued. The second coincided with Iran backing away from at least one execution, which Trump immediately seized on as proof of his own effectiveness. He now boasts that he saved lives and claims Iran promised to stop killing protesters.
This is where Trump’s bluster stops being reckless and starts putting lives at risk.
There is no plausible scenario in which American military power helps an internal protest movement overthrow the Iranian regime. None. U.S. intervention would almost certainly do the opposite—handing the regime a foreign enemy to blame, giving it cover to label protesters as agents of American imperialism, and providing a pretext to rally domestic support around nationalism and fear.
Even Israel understands this. Never hesitant to strike Iranian targets when it believes it must, the country has stayed conspicuously quiet. As a former senior Israeli security official told CNN, “From Israel’s viewpoint, this is not the right time to intervene. There’s no reason to disrupt the internal weakening of the regime or to give it a pretext to rally domestic support.”
That is strategic restraint. Trump’s bluster is not.
Trump speaks from the East Room of the White House in Washington, on June 21, 2025, after the U.S. military struck three Iranian nuclear and military sites, as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listen.
The Iranian regime is not holding onto power because of nuclear facilities or military bases. It is holding onto power because armed men with rifles are murdering civilians. No F-35 fighter jet or B-2 bomber changes that reality. The United States could obliterate Iranian military infrastructure tomorrow and still leave the regime fully capable of suppressing protests the next day.
Now there may be an outcome even worse than Trump’s threats being ignored. Reports suggest the protests have slowed. Trump is celebrating, declaring victory, congratulating himself for “saving lives.”
But fewer people being killed today is not success. It is not freedom. It is not regime change.
What the people of Iran need is the end of the regime. Trump’s intervention may have made that harder.
As Scott Lucas, a Middle East politics expert at University College Dublin, has noted, any serious U.S. administration would carefully consider both Iran’s internal dynamics and the regional consequences of intervention.
“But the US president does not act logically,” he told The Conversation. “He’s a mess of contradictions, wanting to be a bully and a ‘president of peace’ at the same time. So he blusters for days that he will unleash the US military on Iran’s regime. But he’s also seduced by signals from Tehran that it is willing to enter negotiations with him.”
The result may be a temporary easing of tensions that benefits regional stability while leaving Iranian protesters isolated and discouraged. They were promised help. What they got was a U.S. president declaring success when their oppressors briefly paused in their killing. Iran’s murderous theocrats could not be happier.
This is not new. Trump followed the same script in Venezuela—threatening, posturing, and then declaring victory while Nicolás Maduro’s allies remain firmly in power and nothing has fundamentally changed. Trump barges into crises he doesn’t understand, makes them about him, and then pretends whatever outcome emerges equals success.
Sometimes the most helpful thing an American president can do is stay out of the way. With Iran, like so many things, Trump couldn’t manage that. And as usual, he won’t be the one paying the price.
