SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
fascism
No, We Can’t Just Wait for Dictators to Die
If history proves anything when it comes to authoritarian fascists, it’s that patient optimism is not a virtue.
Feb 11, 2026
Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University; her Wikipedia biography describes her as “a scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders.” With these credentials, she has written an opinion piece in the New York Times telling us that dictators and would-be dictators generally make their economies worse and lead a precarious existence. Their efforts often “backfire,” as she puts it.
While this theory might seem like comforting evidence that history “proves” that dictators will get their comeuppance, it is actually a counsel of passively sitting on our hands and waiting out the authoritarian leader: either to await his death, or hang on till he’s ousted from power by his own miscarrying plans. If history proves anything, it’s that patient optimism is not a virtue.
Ben-Ghiat's area of expertise is Benito Mussolini and the fascist era in Italy, and she uses him as an example of a dictator getting what’s coming to him. After surrounding himself with sycophants and employing consistently disastrous military strategies, Mussolini was deposed in 1943 by the Fascist Grand Council: “He spent his last years as the head of the Nazi puppet state the Republic of Salò, his phone tapped by the Germans. He was killed by anti-Fascist partisans in April 1945.”
His demise—being strung up like a side of beef at a Milan filling station—may have been poetic justice, but wasn’t the cost just a little too high? He ruled Italy for 21 years until he was deposed, and by the time of his death, much of the country was in ruins. Italian campaign veteran and Stars and Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin described the landscape as “ghostlike,” recalling walls standing in the moonlight surrounded by rubble, with empty, "single unblinking" windows looking out like eyes. That’s what tends to happen when a dictator’s plans backfire – he pulls the whole country down with him.
The author’s more contemporary example is Vladimir Putin. At the beginning of 2022, she says, Putin had it all, including gold toilet seats in his Crimean palace. But according to Ben-Ghiat, he invaded Ukraine to shore up his waning popularity, a move that did not work out as planned. The Russian dead have piled up, Russia has become more dependent on China, and the economy has sputtered under the burden of the war.
If the cultural constellation provides a measure of both elite and popular support, the dictator can endure for years.
But so what? Putin has been in power for 25 years, and shows no sign of going anywhere soon. Perhaps some faction in the army or the FSB might “terminate him with extreme prejudice” (as the phrase in Apocalypse Now termed an assassination), because they would be the only ones with the firepower to do so, but I suspect Putin’s likely successors would not transform Russia into another Denmark. And Ben-Ghiat undermines her own thesis by reminding us that Donald Trump shows every sign of being willing to bail Putin out of his international difficulties.
Unfortunately, dictatorial systems tend to be more durable than she thinks. How many times in the last four decades have we heard that the Iranian regime is on the point of collapse? Even a usually savvy observer of international relations like Lawrence Freedman has flatly claimed “the regime is doomed.” Perhaps in the long run Freedman will be proved right, but the people in Iran have to live in the short run.
And sometimes the long run is very long. North Korea, possibly the most repressive regime on the planet, has been run as a family business by the Kim dynasty for 78 years. With a per capita GDP that is less than one-sixtieth (note: not one-sixth, one sixtieth!) of South Korea’s, it is the most spectacular example in the world of how dictatorships ruin economies. It also experiences periodic famines. Famine is the single biggest marker for the total failure of a governing system; historically, the one thing any regime wanted to avoid was bread riots in the big cities. Ask the shades of Louis XVI or Tsar Nicholas about it.
Yet, if the regime is repressive enough, as North Korea’s is, it can use lack of food as a regime stabilizer. The army, the secret police, and the regime’s vocal supporters get food as a reward; access to enough calories to survive becomes the reward for loyalty. The rest, as in North Korea or China during the Great Leap Forward, can subsist on grass, wood shavings, and potato peels, and will be too physically debilitated to overthrow the system, even if a comprehensive system of surveillance and informers did not exist.
Donald Trump certainly does not have a hold on the United States like that of Kim Jong-un on North Korea, or Putin on Russia. But even in a “mild” dictatorship, the odds are high that living standards for the average person will decline, free speech will be stifled, and culture will stagnate into regime propaganda and kitsch. Social trust, already in steady decline in the United States since the 1960s, will crater to the levels of Somalia or Yemen.
Without social trust, the economy cannot be entrepreneurial and innovative (as opposed to crony-ridden and subsisting on government favoritism), and our civil society cannot be vibrant and voluntaristic with so many informers about. Art and intellectual activity will wither; our public universities, once the best in the world, will decline to the level of Bob Jones U. or Trump’s own fake university.
I believe that Ben-Ghiat fundamentally errs in emphasizing the dictator, rather than the political and social culture that allows a dictator to reach the top, and that can sustain him in power despite his disastrous mistakes. If the cultural constellation provides a measure of both elite and popular support, the dictator can endure for years.
There is a solid American base of popular backing for fascism, and Trump’s departure from the scene will not cause these people to come to their senses as if by magic.
As in all dictatorships, Trump has a circle of elite supporters. Only in this case, the extent of their international influence is orders of magnitude greater than any previous group of oligarchs. Our American class of billionaires, deci-billionaires, and centi-billionaires dearly loves Trump for the fact that the bribes they render unto him are smaller than the taxes they would have to pay in normal circumstances.
As a bonus, the billionaires receive no-bid contracts; the return on their investment is so great that the public groveling they must periodically perform is well worth it. These malefactors of great wealth will stand like a praetorian guard to protect the privileges they have received under Trump. Any attempt to return America to a functioning representative democracy under the rule of law cannot succeed over the long term unless there is a firm reckoning with our billionaire class.
Finally, dictators must have at least some popular support. Trump’s opponents must contend with the uncomfortable fact that in three consecutive presidential elections, the number of Americans who voted for him grew each time. There is a solid American base of popular backing for fascism, and Trump’s departure from the scene will not cause these people to come to their senses as if by magic.
Ben-Ghiat is trafficking in platitudes by saying that dictators make decisions that are terrible for their countries. That is the nature of dictators and the sycophants who fawn over them; competent and moral people are systematically weeded out of the governmental apparatus and replaced by yes-men. As Hannah Arendt observed 75 years ago:
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
None of this is to say that Trump and his goons cannot be levered out of power. But there is no basis for us to complacently wait for his mistakes to cause the scales to fall from the eyes of his supporters in a miraculous fashion. Making America a decent society will require a tough-mindedness and unflinching determination that Merrick Garland so conspicuously lacked when he had the chance. We must not fail the next chance.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Young Have It Rough in Trump's America, But They're Ready to Fight for Their Future
Tending to real-time crises while preparing for the long haul will require leadership from many in both Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Feb 08, 2026
Here’s a small suggestion from the two authors of this piece (us): Don’t be young in Donald Trump’s America if you can help it. Being young in America right now means you’ll have to contend with stalling job markets, rampant inflation, deep political and economic instability, and impending climate disaster. If you point these things out, you’re labeled a dangerous (and misguided) radical. If you’re too busy trying to make ends meet for you and your family, you get labeled as lazy, apathetic, and defeatist.
This is not to say that older generations are doing okay. They’re not. But at least they’ll get to receive (and not just pay into) social security, which has to make the fascism go down easier. Before we explain or suggest what the young can do about all that, let us start by introducing ourselves, since one of us is indeed still Gen Z.
The authors of this piece are both co-workers and family members. “Theohari,” as some of our colleagues like to call us. Liz is Sam’s aunt and a long-time antipoverty organizer, mother, pastor, and theologian. Sam is a recent college graduate, student organizer, and law nerd. Recently, we were roommates at The Young Organizers Survival Corps boot camp.
Gathering in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains on a 157-acre farm owned and run by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), The Young Organizers Survival Corps kicked off a six-month leadership development program to help prepare the next generation of leaders to resist authoritarianism—something all too crucial in Donald Trump’s America. A hundred young people converged from more than 22 states, representing dozens of campuses and grassroots organizations. Most of them had already been struggling around issues of tenants’ rights, peace and militarism, immigrant rights, abortion rights, mass incarceration, homelessness, healthcare access, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and so much more in this increasingly disturbed country.
To stand any chance of successfully fighting back, we must offer a competing and more attractive vision of the future—one in which young people come to believe that they will not only survive, but lead secure, fulfilling lives.
In our days at that farm, we studied the hard-won lessons of past social movements, trained young people in the tactics of nonviolent resistance and grassroots organizing, practiced hands-on skills in arts and culture, and learned new methods for and reasons to reclaim the power of our faith traditions.
Movement Education
Haley Farm was the perfect setting for just such a boot camp. The farm once belonged to Alex Haley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Both of those masterpieces educated millions of Americans about African-American history and the importance of genealogy, as well as radical political organizing and thought. Urging readers to investigate their own heritage, Haley used storytelling to make the country’s history accessible and inspiring.
The educational mission of Alex Haley and his farm has endured for decades, long past the era in which he and so many others struggled to discover their own political bearings in the Black freedom movement. Since the Children’s Defense Fund bought the Haley Farm in 1994, it has hosted trainings for CDF Freedom Schools, deepened and inspired faith-based child advocacy, convened children’s authors and librarians, hosted the “National Council of Elders” (where young activists and civil rights veterans are able to strategize about the future), and gathered working groups for the Black Community Crusade for Children and the Black Student Leadership Network—and that’s just to begin a list of its work. A couple of months back, for instance, movement elders and Black organizers convened there for training in how to resist this deepening Trumpian moment of growing violence and authoritarianism.
For decades, the leafy folds of the Great Smoky Mountains in the southern Appalachians have housed other epicenters of movement training as well. Haley Farm is just towns away from the Highlander Research and Education Center (once the Highlander Folk School), another freedom training ground. Highlander was founded by popular educator Myles Horton, whose thinking has shaped the work of generations of grassroots leaders, including both of ours.
The Highlander Folk School first emerged as a cradle for organizing during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), it became the official education arm of the industrial labor movement in the South. Over the next two decades, it played an even bigger role in supporting the civil rights movement. Highlander was where the “mother of the movement,” Septima Clark, first experimented with the literacy programs that would become its “citizenship schools”—a network of some 900 community-based schools that taught tens of thousands of Black Southerners to read and pass Jim Crow literacy tests. Highlander was also where a young Rosa Parks studied before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" was popularized, and where generations of organizers and leaders—especially those from the South and Appalachia—discovered the world of activism into which they had been born.
At the Young Organizers boot camp recently, we adorned our classroom with quotes from various movement elders and ancestors, including Black Freedom movement giants who had spent time at Haley Farm and Highlander. One quote from Highlander founder Myles Horton stuck out to us for its prescience. In his autobiography, The Long Haul, he writes:
It’s only in a movement that an idea is often made simple enough and direct enough that it can spread rapidly. Then your leadership multiplies very rapidly, because there’s something explosive going on. People see that other people not so different from themselves do things that they thought could never be done... They’re emboldened and challenged by that to step into the water, and once they get in the water, it’s as if they’ve never not been there… During movement times, the people involved have the same problems and can go from one community to the next, start a conversation in one place, and finish it in another.
At our boot camp, it was clear that, amid much pain in this country, young leaders could start conversations about hope and suggest new strategies for community care and social protest. These conversations were possible only because of the leaders’ clarity around connection. From places like Richmond, Indiana, and Ithaca, New York, to Atlanta, Georgia, and Portland, Oregon, they understood that, no matter their backgrounds, they faced many of the same brutal conditions.
A Turning Point?
Consider the social, political, and economic environment that’s producing the multi-layered crises faced by today’s younger generations. In this rich land of ours, about 45 million people regularly experience hunger and food insecurity, nearly 80 million are uninsured or underinsured when it comes to healthcare, and close to 10 million live without housing or on the brink of homelessness, while our education system continues to score near the bottom compared to the other 37 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Even before Donald Trump reassumed power, young people were affected disproportionately. One year into his second term as president, he and his billionaire lackies have only deepened this suffering.
Indeed, the conditions for discontent among young people are now boiling over. Young workers, students, and children are poised to lose more than any other age group from the Trump administration’s “austerity” policies (which, of course, are anything but “austere” for his billionaire buddies and him). Minors make up 2 in every 5 people currently receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, and the young will disproportionately go hungry as that program is further eroded. (The Trump administration is already threatening to withhold such benefits from some Democratic-controlled states!) Low economic growth, rising inflation, and deepening unemployment are hurting everyone. However, young workers, regardless of their educational background, are seeing a steeper rise in unemployment than the average worker. Compounded by increasing costs of living, mounting debt, and ever more ecological disasters, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are projected to be distinctly worse off than their parents.
Despite a seemingly endless barrage of think pieces bemoaning the fickleness and apathy of the young, teenagers and young adults have been at the forefront of every significant struggle of this moment.
It’s been this very real pain and insecurity that the MAGA crew and Christian nationalist organizers have successfully leveraged to build a strong base among young workers and students. Organizations like Turning Point USA are now leading massive organizing drives on high school and college campuses, tapping into the real fear and instability experienced by students and other young people. Those groups fob off the real problems of this country (only intensified by Donald Trump) on scapegoats like trans athletes and Somali childcare workers, while offering an alluring vision of an authoritarian Christian future. It matters little that, for most Americans, the vision on offer will be impossible to achieve. And were it to be achieved, it would benefit only the whitest, wealthiest, and “most” Christian Americans. Therein lies both a contradiction and an opening.
Historically, we know that once fascism solidifies power, it can take years of unyielding resistance to revive a democratic society. That means we need mobilization now, while preparing for the fight already at hand that’s likely to stretch on for years to come. Tending to real-time crises while preparing for the long haul will require leadership from many in both Gen Z and Gen Alpha. To stand any chance of successfully fighting back, we must offer a competing and more attractive vision of the future—one in which young people come to believe that they will not only survive, but lead secure, fulfilling lives. And on-the-ground organizing infrastructure must be built up to make that vision a reality.
The Kids Aren’t Alright. But They Could Be.
This moment offers us a heartbreaking reminder of just how vulnerable most young people now are. The young organizers gathered at Haley Farm talked about not being able to afford the basics of life, while some who lived close to the farm asked us to bring leftover food to community members and church friends because so many of them are now living hand-to-mouth.
And such vulnerability and economic precarity are anything but the exception. Dozens of young people indicated that they are hurting in so many ways: by family members being abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), by being unable to acquire the healthcare they need, or even by being harassed by the feds for protecting their neighbors from state violence. Avenues of traditional politics feel inaccessible as a means of addressing so many of their problems and, where accessible, regularly proved critically insufficient.
We were astounded by the diversity of people and struggles in that room, but we were even more surprised by the ease with which those young leaders grasped their interconnectedness. They hardly needed convincing that some lessons one might draw from the difficulty of running an abortion fund in the midst of attacks on women and the right to choose could also apply to the needs immigrants have in facing ICE’s militarization of their communities. They knew such things to be true because many had lived through them.
Despite a seemingly endless barrage of think pieces bemoaning the fickleness and apathy of the young, teenagers and young adults have been at the forefront of every significant struggle of this moment. Indeed, young people have long taken leadership roles in bottom-up social movements because they so often bear the brunt of our nation’s social and economic inequalities, with few avenues for relief in traditional American politics.
It’s an underappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives do matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, while defending economic justice and living wages, not to speak of abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and an end to gun violence. Just this month, inside Dilley Detention Center in Texas, hundreds of imprisoned children led their families in righteous protest after learning of ICE’s kidnapping of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his imminent transfer to Dilley.
The stakes are only getting higher for those of us coming of age at a moment when this country is changing from something like a democracy to Donald Trump’s chilling autocratic version of America. Yet if we know anything from decades of antipoverty organizing, it’s that the unfettered imaginations, moral clarity, and capacity for decisive action of young Americans can always triumph over the misguided political liaisons of their elders. As our communities struggle righteously to wrest this nation from the clutches of full-throated authoritarianism, isn’t it time to cultivate the untapped might of those potentially dispossessed generations?
We need their courageous leadership now more than ever. We have no time to lose!
Keep ReadingShow Less
Fascist Trump Has No Moral Authority to Criticize Iran
The offing of Renee Nicole Good didn’t differ in kind from the deaths inflicted on dissidents by the Iranian state.
Feb 03, 2026
The pro-democracy protesters in Iran deserved so much better. They deserved the support of a democratic United States that could sincerely urge the rule of law and habeas corpus (allowing people to legally challenge their detentions) be respected, not to speak of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly in accordance with the Constitution. Unfortunately, President Donald J. Trump has forfeited any claim to respect for such rights or a principled foreign policy and so has proved strikingly ineffective in aiding those protesters.
The arbitrary arrests and killings committed by agents of Trump’s authoritarian-style rule differ only in number, not in kind, from the detainments and killings of protesters carried out by the basij (or pro-regime street militias) in Iran. In fact, they rendered hisprotests and bluster about Iran the height of hypocrisy. Above all, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis by a Trumpian Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent haunted his response, providing the all-too-grim Iranian regime with an easy rebuttal to American claims of moral superiority.
Rioters and Terrorists
Trump’s threats of intervention in Iran came after the latest round of demonstrations and strikes there this winter. In late December, bazaar merchants in Iran decried the collapse of the nation’s currency, the rial. For many years, it had been under severe pressure thanks to Trump’s “maximum pressure” sanctions, renewed European sanctions over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, and incompetent government financial policies. In December, the rial fell to 1.4 million to the dollar—and no, that is not a misprint—having lost 40% of its value over the course of the previous year. Inflation was already running at 42%, harming those on fixed incomes, while the rial’s decline particularly hurt the ability of Iranians to afford imported goods.
Such currency instability contributed to economic stagnation, as many merchants went on strike and halted commercial transactions altogether, given the heavy losses they were suffering. For the rest of December and early January, those striking traders were joined by professionals, workers, and students nationwide, some of whom wanted not just a better economy, but a less authoritarian government. The government responded, of course, with grimly repressive tactics, but the size of the crowds only grew, even in the capital, Tehran, while some of the protesters began demanding an end to the Islamic Republic.
Trump’s America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities.
A turning point came on January 8, when security force thugs began shooting down demonstrators en masse and stacking up bodies. Until then, the demonstrations had been largely peaceful (though instances of vandalism had been reported), but the government began alleging that more than 100 police had been killed. Human Rights Watch reported that “verified footage shows some protesters engaging in acts of violence.” That some dissidents had turned to violence, however, can’t in any way justify the scale of the slaughter by security forces that followed.
By mid-January, human rights organizations were estimating that thousands of demonstrators had been mown down by the Iranian police and military. Even Iran’s clerical leader, Ali Khamenei, confirmed that thousands were dead, though ludicrously enough, he blamed Donald Trump for instigating their acts. On January 9, perhaps as a cover for its police and military sniping into crowds, the government cut the country’s internet off, while denouncing all protesters as “rioters” and “terrorists.”
Antifa-Led Hellfire
And here’s the truly sad thing: While such unhinged rhetorical excesses were once the province of dictatorships and other authoritarian regimes like those in Iran and North Korea, the White House is now competing with Tehran and Pyongyang on a remarkably even playing field. The Trump White House, for instance, excused the dispatch of the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, last year on the grounds of a “Radical left reign of terror,” “antifa-led hellfire,” and “lunatics” committing widespread mayhem in that city, even deploying “explosives.” Of course, Trump’s image of Portland as an apocalyptic, anarchist free-fire zone bore no relation to reality, but it did bear an eerie relation to the language of the authoritarian regimes in Iran and North Korea.
That means Trump’s America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities. Similarly, Washington’s full-throated backing of Israel’s genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza raised questions about its alleged support for populations in the Global South demanding freedom. Nor could Trump’s naked power grab in Venezuela, explicitly carried out for the sake of stealing that country’s petroleum, have been reassuring to the inhabitants of a petrostate like Iran.
The killing of poet and mother of three Renee Nicole Good, a Christian who had done mission work, by a belligerent ICE agent on January 7 in Minneapolis and similar killings (which continue, as with Alex Pretti) don’t, of course, compare in scale to Tehran’s grim treatment of Iranian protesters in January. This country may, however, be considered closer to such a—can I even use the word?—model, if we include those who were brutalized and killed once Trump offshored them to the notorious CECOT mega-prison and torture facility in El Salvador (about which, by the way, right-wing Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s new propaganda outlet, CBS News, attempted to avoid informing us).
We may come closer still if we include Iranian-American dissidents and those of other nationalities deported by Trump, after he arbitrarily denied them asylum, raising questions about the fate of hundreds or possibly thousands of activists being returned to despotic home countries–or sometimes to third countries like South Sudan in the midst of civil war. That the Trump regime (like the Iranian one) is willing to sacrifice massive numbers of people for the sake of ideology is clear. Oxfam estimates that Trump’s destruction of the US Agency for International Development led to the deaths of 200,000 children globally in 2025 (and that, of course, isn’t even counting dead adults).
The point, however, is not equivalency in scale. There’s an anecdote from the 1930s about then-media-magnate Max Aitkin (also known as Lord Beaverbrook), a British-Canadian politician. He was said to be at a cocktail party conversing with an attractive woman, when the conversation turned to ethics. He then asked her if she would sleep with someone for a million British pounds. She replied that she would. He then asked, “Would you sleep with someone for five pounds?” She replied indignantly, “Certainly not, what sort of woman do you think I am?” And he observed dryly, “Madame, we have already established that. Now we are just haggling about the price.”
In the same vein, we’ve already established that Trump’s minions are lawless kidnappers and killers—now we’re just haggling about the number of their victims (so far) compared to those of other authoritarian regimes. In truth, the offing of Renee Nicole Good didn’t differ in kind from the deaths inflicted on dissidents by the Iranian state. She was murdered by an ICE agent in a fit of pique for a nonviolent protest. He (or one of his compatriots) then muttered of that gentle Christian, “Fucking bitch!”
An American Basij?
Even the spin the Iranian and American governments put on their crackdowns was essentially indistinguishable. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called the Iranian protesters “saboteurs” and “vandals.” Similarly, cartoonish Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and ghoulish White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller denounced Renee Nicole Good as a “domestic terrorist,” while the spineless Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) accused her of “impeding law enforcement.” Administration officials also denounced her as a “professional agitator” and President Trump justified her killing, saying that her actions had been “tough.”
Such allegations fly in the face of the straightforward record offered from the many videos of the incident released by bystanders and even by the killer, which show that an inoffensive Good said, “I’m not mad at you, dude,” just before her life was taken. In other words, the Trump regime vindicated ICE on that killing on the same grounds that Khamenei and his officials excused the carnage against protesters in Iran.
The Good slaying came on the heels of numerous Trump administration attempts to provoke civil unrest by illegally sending the National Guard into the cities of Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, DC, Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago, all politically controlled by Democrats, allegedly to “protect” masked, armed ICE goons. The intent was to erode the 1888 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using federal troops in local law enforcement. Nevertheless, National Guardsmen in Los Angeles detained American citizens. Even ICE does not have any statutory authority to arrest, order around, or tear-gas citizens not reasonably suspected of immigration offenses or of violence toward persons or property. (Nor are the plainclothes members of the basij paramilitary in Iran, loyal to Khamenei’s person, properly considered “law enforcement.”)
Though it’s not mentioned in our news world, it couldn’t be clearer that Ayatollah Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei share a bloodthirsty perspective on “law and order.”
Yet ICE now routinely arrests (and in Good’s case executed) Americans doing no harm, while attempting to interfere with their right to assemble peaceably or record public actions. As one such victim told journalist Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, “My name is George Retes Jr. I’m 25 years old. I was born and raised here in Ventura, California. I’m a father of two, and yeah, I’m a US citizen. The day I was arrested by ICE agents was July 10.” Similarly, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, sometimes basing themselves at historic sites of genocide against Indigenous nations, have arrested some of their members, whose families began coming to North America 30,000 years ago.
Such ironies have not been lost on Iranian officials. As Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in Beirut recently, speaking of Good’s death: “We have seen Trump trying to deploy the National Guard in his own country. In the last two days we saw how [ICE] killed a 37-year-old woman.” He then added, “And we found Trump is the one who defended this action by the police. But in his dealings with the Iranians, we see him telling the government if you shoot a bullet against those protesters, then I’ll come for you.”
It’s One of Those Things
The autocrats in Tehran proved all too capable of bringing Trump around to their point of view, at least for a moment. In mid-January, after he had spent a week threatening war against Iran’s ayatollahs over their atrocities, he heard Araghchi’s interview on Fox News and abruptly executed an about-face. “They said people were shooting at them with guns, and they were shooting back,” Trump remarked. “And you know, it’s one of those things. But they told me that there’ll be no executions, and so I hope that’s true.”
Though it’s not mentioned in our news world, it couldn’t be clearer that Ayatollah Trump and Ayatollah Khamenei share a bloodthirsty perspective on “law and order.”
Trump has no principles, and so he didn’t back off even temporarily in mid-January from initiating a war on Iran on ethical grounds. Instead, the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Oman, who have cultivated close relationships with the American president, argued that bombing Iran could work against the protesters, uniting the country against a foreign attacker. They also worried about the regional instability and disruption to oil markets that a US strike might bring about. After all, in the summer of 2025, after Trump ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, that country struck out at al-Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar, which is leased to the US military.
Above all, however, at that moment of indecision, Trump seemed unable to imagine a way personally to profit from an assault on Iran, unlike Venezuela.
In short, Trump is the least plausible critic imaginable when it comes to the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. After all, how can an administration promoting a fundamentalist attack on science and sexual rights lecture fundamentalist Iran? How can an administration that arranged for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to balloon into a $75 billion agency, that routinely disregards the First, Fourth, and Sixth Amendments, criticize Iran for maintaining a force of 90,000 pro-regime basij militiamen? How can Trump, with his white Protestant nationalism dedicated to expelling untold numbers of Hispanic Catholics, lecture Iran over deporting 1.5 million Afghans in 2025?
Ringing Fatally Hollow
Notoriously, US administrations apply a hectoring human-rights discourse only to states they view as enemies, not to friendly ones. Absolute monarchies, autocracies, or dictatorships that routinely jail, torture, and execute dissidents like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and El Salvador are neither singled out for public denunciation nor threatened by the White House, as long as they are seen as serving Washington’s interests.
The extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, still committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and assiduously pursuing the crime of apartheid in the Palestinian West Bank, is showered with praise and billions of taxpayer dollars in weaponry. State Department spokespeople deal with such Himalayan-sized hypocrisy by a studied silence or by weasel words (which some of them may later repent).
Trumpism can’t possibly succeed in the necessary work of human-rights advocacy because his American form of fascism doesn’t believe in constitutional or human rights, not abroad or, for that matter, at home.
Don’t misunderstand. I’m not arguing that what’s happening in Iran is no different from tolerated atrocities elsewhere and therefore should be disregarded. The egregious violence of the Iranian government toward protesters this winter far outstripped even what’s grimly normal in that country. In the much more sustained and widespread demonstrations of the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, the agents of the ayatollahs killed between 70 and 200 people. Now, the government itself admits that its victims are in the thousands.
Nothing hurts more than the image of idealistic young Iranians pawing through corpses searching for loved ones. Nothing would please me more than to see Iran move toward democracy. The problem is that Trumpism can’t possibly succeed in the necessary work of human-rights advocacy because his American form of fascism doesn’t believe in constitutional or human rights, not abroad or, for that matter, at home. In short, if Donald Trump can’t denounce the killing of Renee Nicole Good, his denunciations of the killings in Iran ring fatally hollow.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular