Why Trump could topple Iran’s tyrants and secure his place in history

The difference between the illusion of power and its reality is the difference between Ayatollah Khamenei and President Donald Trump. Trump is on the verge of joining the small number of American presidents who are remaking the world. Khamenei is on the brink of the abyss of history reserved for murderous fanatics. If Trump tips Khamenei on this issue, the president’s place in history will be strengthened. He will have restored freedom to the great Persian people.

As Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela have discovered, belief in the unlimited power of a totalitarian government to sustain itself and protect its rulers is a dangerous hubris. Ayatollah Khamenei may be in the process of discovering the same harsh truth: No government, no matter how brutal, can survive centuries or even decades in the face of a resentful population.

Even the Caesars or the Roman rulers at the height of the Severan dynasty were not guaranteed eternal power. The Soviet Union, which had both nuclear weapons and a ubiquitous security service, survived only from 1922 to 1991.

IRAN TURNED ‘KILL BUTTON’ TO HIDE ALLEGED CRIMES AS DEATH TOLL INCREASED AMONG PROTESTS

The Assad family came to power in 1971, when Hafez Assad consolidated control in Syria, and retained it until December 2024, when his son and other family members were forced to flee to Russia.

“Papa Doc” Duvalier seized power in Haiti in 1957 and held it until his death in 1971. He was succeeded by his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed “Baby Doctor”, who was forced to flee in February 1986.

Hugo Chavez first tried to come to power through a coup in Venezuela in 1992, failed, and then won power in 1999; He never relinquished that power until this month, when Nicholas Maduro took over the police state until his death, when the American military assisted American law enforcement on President Trump’s orders to take Maduro to a New York Prison.

American government survives because it relies on the consent of the governed. Any political entity with uneasy control at best, punctuated by attempts at insurrection by a people desiring freedom and prosperity.

We are watching in real time the third attempt of the Iranian people to throw off the shackles of the “Islamic Republic of Iran”, which was imposed on them by the fanatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979 and has oppressed the Iranian people for decades. Khomeini overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979, and now the Shah’s son can return as constitutional ruler to replace Khomeini’s hand-picked successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. This ayatollah is as ruthless as the first ayatollah, and hundreds of people are slaughtered by his thugs as they try desperately to control the kleptocracy, but the Iranian people have seen their life savings destroyed, their drinking water contaminated, and their electricity cut off again and again. The country is in dire straits, and its people, crushed by Israeli and American air and missile power last summer, have begun their third week of mass protests. If the United States or the Jewish state makes the final move, the great people of Iran, 500 years older than Christianity, will re-emerge and regain their place among the great civilizations of the planet.

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The dictatorship of Fidel’s successor, Miguel Díaz-Canel in Cuba, and then Raul Castro, also appears shaky, even as mullahs and stormtroopers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tremble and fire wildly into crowds of hundreds of thousands. As in Venezuela, Syria and the Soviets before them, the Cuban regime is based on the illusion of permanence. But their people cannot eat illusions or drink fantasies.

Three times before, Iran’s tyrants had faced serious challenges to their rule; but each time – in the late 1990s, during the Green Movement of 2009, and in 2022 with the Iranian women’s movement, commonly known as the Iranian women’s movement. ““Women, Life, Freedom” – The power of the Ayatollahs was challenged, but these challenges were not even supported by encouraging words by the American presidents of the time. Ayatollah Khomeini came to power while Jimmy Carter was in office and remained in power through the failed revolutions under Khamenei, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

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In Iran’s current turmoil, President Donald Trump has been a strong supporter of the Iranian people seeking freedom. President Trump gave many warnings to Khamenei, just as he did to Maduro. Just as Maduro ignored them, Khamenei responded by mocking the US president. The Ayatollah also cut off his country’s internet and mobile phone services and ordered his thugs to open fire.

Will it work again? Nobody knows. All we know is that an oppressed people cannot be oppressed forever. And the presidents who helped liberate them earn the applause and respect of history.

Hugh Hewitt, Fox News contributor and “The Hugh Hewitt Show” weekday afternoons from 3 to 6 p.m. ET on the Salem Radio Network and simulcast on the Salem News Channel. Hugh takes Americans home to the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on more than 400 affiliates nationwide and on all streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest of Fox News Channel’s news roundtable hosted by Bret Baier on weekdays at 6 p.m. ET A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he started his eponymous radio show in Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has appeared frequently on all major national news television networks, hosted television programs for PBS and MSNBC, written for all major American newspapers, and authored a dozen books. He has moderated multiple Republican candidate debates, most recently the 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in 2015-16. Hewitt focuses his radio show and column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians Today Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests, from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush.

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