President Donald Trump billed strikes on Venezuela earlier this month as being about medication, gangs invading the United States and legislation enforcement – i.e. arresting indicted chief Nicolás Maduro. But of late, he appears conspicuously preoccupied with the country’s oil wealth.
And the American folks appear to have observed. A CBS News poll final week confirmed many Americans thought the administration’s targets in Venezuela had been about oil (59% saying the targets had been “a lot” about entry to oil) or about increasing US energy (51%) – extra so than medication (38%), an invasion of gangs and terrorists (37%) or imposing the legislation (31%).
That’s fairly gorgeous. It took years for the thought to take maintain that George W. Bush’s administration invaded Iraq underneath false pretenses (about weapons of mass destruction); Americans are already largely there when it comes to Venezuela.
Now, may comparable overseas motion be taking place for the second time in early 2026 – this time in Iran?
Trump has repeatedly in latest days floated a navy intervention to, in his phrases, “rescue” Iranian protesters focused and killed by the regime.
But at dwelling, Trump has wielded a really selective view of the sanctity of protests and free speech – because the final week in Minneapolis has proven.
Trump, who already struck Iran’s nuclear program final yr, has for the previous 10 days performed up the protests there and pledged to defend the protesters if want be.
He stated on January 2 that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.”
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he added on social media.
Trump echoed this to Fox News’ Sean Hannity final week, saying: “I’ve told them that if they do anything bad to these people, we’re going to hit them very hard.”
The protest death toll has now topped 500, according to a US-based human rights group. And Trump stated late Sunday night time aboard Air Force One that his administration was learning the causes of dying and would “make a determination” about how to proceed.
But the president’s document when it comes to inviolability of protests and free speech is reasonably inconsistent – and infrequently appears to rely largely on whether or not he agrees with the protesters’ message.
Trump and his administration final week leapt to paint the lady killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis as a harmful provocateur engaged in “domestic terrorism” – regardless of a lack of evidence that Renee Nicole Good intentionally focused the agent along with her automobile. NCS has been unable to decide whether or not Good was concerned in a community of activists attempting to intervene as immigration raids unfold.
Social media has for months featured broadly shared movies of federal brokers getting aggressive not simply with their targets, but in addition with apparently peaceful protesters, as NCS reported final month. We’ve additionally seen such scenes as protests have elevated in Minneapolis in latest days.
The New York Times requested Trump about aggressive ways getting used in opposition to protesters in an interview final week, and he appeared largely unbothered – repeatedly dodging the query.
“Well, I think that ICE has been treated very badly,” he responded.
This is a well-recognized dynamic with the president.
When thousands and thousands protested in opposition to him at “No Kings” rallies throughout the nation in October, Trump and prime Republicans previewed the demonstrations by repeatedly and baselessly deriding those involved as antifa, terrorist sympathizers and even terrorists themselves. Some even predicted important unrest – this regardless of earlier “No Kings” protests having featured little or no violence.
And positive sufficient, the most recent protests had been nearly wholly peaceable.
A month earlier, Trump floated a federal crackdown on left-wing groups, baselessly accusing them of getting one thing to do with Charlie Kirk’s assassination. (This regardless of federal legislation enforcement having stated the suspect, Tyler Robinson, seems to have acted alone.)
Trump and a few prime administration officers on the time repeatedly steered the doable want to scale back free speech protections.
Also this yr, Trump has exaggerated violence at anti-ICE protests and in different contexts in order to justify his home deployments of troops. Judges, together with Republican-appointed ones, repeatedly rejected those claims.
And earlier this yr, he described some protests as “illegal” and focused authorized immigrants who expressed pro-Palestinian views for deportation.
Further again, Trump has additionally stated criticizing judges should be illegal (regardless of his personal historical past of usually criticizing judges). He’s advocated the criminalization of flag-burning and even steered NFL gamers who didn’t stand for the nationwide anthem “shouldn’t be in the country.” He’s labeled protests he didn’t like as “insurrection.”
Trump’s former protection secretary stated he advocated shooting protesters in the legs during his first term. And across the identical time, as racial-justice protesters took to the streets throughout the nation in 2020, Trump promoted a video of a supporter saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”
Finally, there are some older feedback which might be significantly related at present.
While Trump is constructing himself up as a possible savior for protesters in Iran, he’s repeatedly spoken as if repression is simply one thing that sturdy international locations do to their residents.
Perhaps essentially the most notorious instance was Trump being requested in 2017 about Russian President Vladimir Putin killing his enemies. (“You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump stated.)
But much more hanging than that had been Trump’s feedback in 1990, nicely earlier than he first ran for president, about China’s dealing with of Tiananmen Square demonstrators.
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it,” Trump told Playboy again then. “Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak.”
Trump in the identical interview cited “demonstrations and picketing” in the Soviet Union and stated then-President Mikhail Gorbachev was “not a firm enough hand.”
Trump claimed throughout his 2016 marketing campaign, when these feedback resurfaced, that he hadn’t been advocating China’s crackdown in Tiananmen Square. But it’s hardly the one proof that he usually avoids judging these items by way of a constant, pro-civil liberties lens. His lens is as an alternative usually about energy and whether or not he likes what the protesters are saying.
Which makes it a bit of troublesome to consider his motivation in Iran is exactly what he says it is.