When it comes to authoritarian regimes like the one currently ruling Iran, any threats to their iron grip on power are met with brutal repression and violence, something we are unfortunately seeing play out on the street of Tehran and across the Middle Eastern country over the past three weeks. While we don’t yet know the exact death toll, estimates reach into the thousands – or more.
But in a new interview published Saturday by Politico, President Donald Trump points out that there is another regular tool that despots like Iran’s mullahs employ. I’ll swing back to that in a minute.
The comments by the president come in the wake of Iran allegedly canceling a planned execution of potentially hundreds of protesters, and making a threat of an assassination attempt on the U.S. president, as RedState wrote.
Pres. Trump vowed that the U.S. would “come to their rescue,” if the deaths by Iran were carried out.
READ MORE: Secret Service Now Alert Due to Iran’s Assassination Threat
Amid Protests, Iran Airs Ominous New Threat Aimed at President Trump
On Saturday, Trump first addressed the possibility of U.S. forces intervening in Iran, telling Politico that “The best decision he [Khamenei] ever made was not hanging more than 800 people two days ago.”
The remarks on how authoritarians utilise the tactic of blatant lying and propaganda came up when the interviewer read a series of barbed taunts aimed at Trump, via posts on Khamenei’s official X account.
One of them tried to blame Trump personally for the thousands of deaths of Iranians since the people began to rise up in protest over decades of repression:
We find the US President guilty due to the casualties, damages and slander he inflicted upon the Iranian nation.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) January 17, 2026
Another post accused him of slandering the people of Iran by saying they were the ones causing the violence and mayhem:
The US President introduced the groups who committed acts of vandalism, arson, and murdered people as “the Iranian nation.” He uttered an appalling slander against the Iranian people. We find the US President guilty for this slander.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) January 17, 2026
Notice how whoever wrote the post dishonestly tried to couch the killings and destruction as being caused by “groups.” As I pointed out earlier, this violence and mayhem can be laid squarely at the feet of the brutal regime.
Trump refused to respond in kind to the taunts, though. What he did was calmly speak about the truth of what the mullahs’ “leadership” is actually doing, and that it isn’t how you lead a country by any normal definition.
“Leadership is about respect, not fear and death,” Pres. Trump said, adding that “[t]he man is a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people.”
“His country is the worst place to live anywhere in the world because of poor leadership,” he said.
Speaking specifically about Khamenei, the president did not mince words:
“What he is guilty of, as the leader of a country, is the complete destruction of the country and the use of violence at levels never seen before. In order to keep the country functioning — even though that function is a very low level — the leadership should focus on running his country properly, like I do with the United States, and not killing people by the thousands in order to keep control.”
This was exactly how an American president should respond, instead of showing weakness like the Biden administration, when they kept coddling the regime with nuclear deals that did little to nothing to end Iran’s ambitions. In this case, instead of lashing out at the direct threats of assassination and these new insults, Trump did the right thing and reminded everyone in the world what’s actually happening in Iran. Stay tuned, readers.
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