On Saturday, a little less than two weeks after protests spread across Iran, US President Donald Trump posted a message of support on his social media platform of choice: “Iran is looking at freedom like never before. America stands ready to help!!! President Donald J. Trump.”
As always, President Trump’s random capitalization scheme and excessive use of exclamation points would be more appropriate for an elementary school student than the leader of a global superpower. But the U.S. aid promise is also flawed in far more important ways.
First of all, “aid” is not exactly America’s strong suit. Especially not under the leadership of the man who bombed Iran last summer, shortly after returning to power on a promise to keep the United States out of foreign wars.
Moreover, President Trump is responsible for maintaining the crippling sanctions regime against the Islamic Republic, thereby fueling the high inflation that triggered the current protests in the first place. As usual in this form of economic warfare, Iran’s non-elites paid the highest price.
In addition to constituting a departure from President Trump’s entire “America First” premise, recent offers of “aid” to Iranians signal a shift in the president’s rhetoric toward the much-maligned Iran. Previously, President Trump’s rhetoric focused primarily on Iran’s purported pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles equipped with chemical and biological warheads, all of which were touted as dangerous threats not only to the United States but also to the state of Israel, America’s best friend and current regional partner in the region’s genocide.
But now President Trump is in “rescue” mode, warning this month that “if Iran continues to shoot and violently kill peaceful protesters, as is its custom, the United States will come to their rescue.”
On Tuesday, President Trump assured Iranian protesters that “help is on the way” without elaborating. Right-wing media outlets in the U.S. endorsed the move with reassuring headlines such as “Trump has a historic chance to help overthrow Iran’s U.S.-hating regime.”
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chimed in, declaring that Israel “supports the struggle for freedom” of Iranian protesters and categorically condemns the mass killing of innocent civilians. These are the exact words of a man who has been leading the massacre of Palestinians for over two years.
Looking at recent pledges of aid, one can’t help but wonder if President Trump is not reading through the old playbook of former US President George W. Bush, the former head of the War on Terror and the face of an administration devoted to promoting the very neoconservative ideology that Trump ostensibly opposed for years.
Essentially, the goal of neocons is to wreak military havoc around the world, using democracy promotion and other ostensibly good ideas as a pretext for deadly imperial expansion. And while Trump has managed to charm many US voters with his sheer narcissism and a promise to abandon such pursuits in faraway lands in favor of “making America great again,” the neoconservative impulses seem hard to contain.
Indeed, Trump’s presidency is reminiscent of Bush’s in many ways. They both have clown-like demeanors, and would be downright funny if it weren’t for the large-scale bloodshed they each presided over, not to mention their interesting relationships with English grammar and spelling.
Similarly, both men proved disproportionately eager to invoke God as an ally in their destructive endeavors.
Despite professing opposition to regime change policies and Bush-era interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan (part of the War on Terror that ultimately killed millions of people), President Trump bombed various countries and successfully kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in his first year in office.
Florida congressman Randy Fine, who just introduced a bill that would allow President Trump to annex Greenland, also suggested that X should be done with Maduro Khamenei. In this case, “Khamenei” refers to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and “Maduro” functions as an entirely new verb to abduct the leader of a sovereign state.
But President Trump is now promising that the United States is “ready to help!!!” It’s worth thinking back to other examples of America’s “Help me, Iran!” In this country, as in 1953, when the CIA staged a coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, setting the stage for the long reign of the torture-happy Shah of Iran, which was ultimately overthrown by the Iranian revolution in 1979.
The late Shah’s son, coincidentally, is now conveniently agitating for U.S. intervention from his position in a gilded asylum on the outskirts of Washington, D.C.
President Trump, on the other hand, may have found the privilege of “helping” people in other countries as a way to distract from certain anti-democratic realities at home. Among them is that the United States would be transformed into a full-fledged police state, with immigration agents free to kill American citizens at will.
And as Trump continues to semi-guide Bush, what the Iranians need most is for the US to “come to their rescue.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
