TRUMP TAKES THE GLOVES OFF: A CALL FOR REGIME CHANGE IN IRAN

On Jan. 17, 2026, President Donald J. Trump delivered one of the most uncompromising foreign-policy statements of the modern era — precisely the kind of leadership the world has lacked for too long. In a blistering interview with Politico, Trump declared without hesitation that “it’s time to look for new leadership in Iran.”

This wasn’t mild diplomatic rhetoric. This was a president calling out tyranny by name.

Trump lambasted Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, labeling him a “sick man” presiding over a regime that has allowed thousands of its own citizens to perish in brutal anti-government protests. Trump said Iran under Khamenei is “the worst place to live anywhere in the world because of poor leadership.”

President Donald J. Trump did something no timid statesman, no career diplomat, and no globalist bureaucrat has dared to do in decades: he spoke plainly about evil. As the streets of Iran filled with smoke, blood, and defiance, as thousands of ordinary men and women stood against an Islamist regime that has ruled them through fear for nearly half a century, Trump declared what the world’s elites refuse to say out loud. “It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran.”

Those words cut through the fog of diplomatic cowardice like a blade. They were not wrapped in the soft language of “concern” or “dialogue.” They were not diluted by think-tank jargon. They carried moral clarity. They named the truth. A government that kills its own people by the thousands has forfeited its right to rule.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, admitted that “several thousand” Iranians have been killed during weeks of mass protests. Even that number, offered grudgingly, is likely a fraction of the real toll. Entire neighborhoods have been sealed off. Cities plunged into darkness. The internet throttled so the world cannot see the corpses, the funerals, the mothers screaming in the streets. Yet instead of remorse, Khamenei offered blame. He pointed at America. He pointed at Trump. He accused the leader of the free world of “encouraging” the people of Iran to rise.

What kind of regime feels threatened by hope?

This is the nature of Islamist tyranny. It does not fear tanks or missiles as much as it fears a man who tells the truth. It does not tremble before armies as much as it trembles before the idea that a citizen might stand upright and say, “I will not live on my knees.” The rulers of Tehran understand something that too many Western politicians have forgotten: once a people lose their fear, a dictatorship is already dead.

For decades, the world has been trained to treat Iran’s regime as permanent. We were told that the mullahs are “complex,” that their ideology must be “understood,” that their brutality is merely a cultural expression. We were warned that any challenge to their authority would “destabilize” the region. So presidents shook hands with murderers. Envoys bowed before clerics. Billions were wired to a system that exported terror while starving its own citizens. Every concession made in the name of “peace” bought the regime more time to build prisons, gallows, and graveyards.

Trump shattered that illusion.

He did not ask how to preserve the Islamic Republic. He asked why it deserves to survive at all.

When Trump said Iran is “the worst place to live anywhere in the world because of poor leadership,” he was not exaggerating. He was describing a reality millions endure every day. A nation rich in history, culture, and human potential has been reduced to an economic prison camp. Inflation devours wages. Food grows scarce. Electricity flickers. Young people with university degrees drive taxis and sell trinkets on sidewalks. Women are beaten for showing strands of hair. Men disappear for whispering dissent. The regime funds militias in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Gaza while its own elderly rummage through trash for scraps.

This is not mismanagement. It is ideology in action.

Islamist rule is not merely a form of governance. It is a system built on submission. It demands obedience not just to law, but to doctrine. It claims divine authority while delivering human misery. Every failure becomes a test of faith. Every protest becomes heresy. Every cry for freedom becomes treason against God.

And now, for the first time in years, the people of Iran are saying no.

The protests that erupted in late December did not begin as a revolution. They began as a groan. A collective exhale of exhaustion. Bread prices. Fuel costs. Empty shelves. Closed factories. But once the crowds gathered, once voices merged, the chant changed. It was no longer about wages. It was about chains. “Death to the dictator.” “This is our country.” “We want our lives back.”

The regime responded the only way it knows how: with bullets.

Security forces fired into crowds. Basij militias dragged teenagers into vans. Courts held mass trials in secret. Hangings were scheduled in batches. The message was clear: obedience or extinction. When Trump revealed that hundreds of scheduled executions were abruptly canceled, it exposed the regime’s greatest fear. Not sanctions. Not war. Exposure.

A tyrant can survive poverty. He can survive isolation. He can even survive military defeat. What he cannot survive is a world that sees him clearly.

That is why Khamenei raged. That is why he lashed out at Trump. That is why he called him “guilty” of the deaths his own apparatus caused. It is the oldest tactic of despots: accuse your accuser. Project your crimes. Rewrite reality. In Tehran’s mythology, unarmed protesters become foreign agents. Mothers become saboteurs. Truth becomes treason.

But lies collapse when confronted by courage.

Trump’s message to the Iranian people was simple: you are not alone. He did not promise invasion. He did not announce bombs. He offered something far more dangerous to a dictatorship—recognition. He treated the protesters as moral actors, not pawns. He acknowledged their agency. He told them the free world sees them.

That alone is revolutionary.

Every authoritarian regime depends on the belief that resistance is futile. That no one cares. That the jail cell is all that exists. When the President of the United States says, “I see you,” the walls begin to crack.

This is why the global establishment recoils from Trump’s words. Not because they are reckless, but because they are disruptive. They threaten a comfortable order in which tyrannies are managed, not challenged. In which diplomats fly first class to conferences while dissidents rot in basements. In which “stability” is prized over justice, and silence is mistaken for peace.

Trump refuses that order.

He understands that history does not belong to caretakers. It belongs to confrontors.

The same critics who once warned that moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem would ignite the Middle East now warn that supporting Iranian protesters will “escalate tensions.” They were wrong then. They are wrong now. Tyranny does not calm itself. It expands until checked. Appeasement is not restraint. It is invitation.

Iran’s regime has spent decades waging undeclared war against the free world. It armed Hezbollah. It trained Hamas. It funded militias that killed American soldiers. It plotted assassinations on foreign soil. It chanted “Death to America” while receiving Western money. And still, Western leaders pretended this was a misunderstanding.

Trump never did.

He recognized that ideology matters. That regimes built on religious absolutism cannot be reasoned into moderation. That you cannot bribe a worldview that believes compromise is sin. His policy was not rooted in naïveté. It was rooted in realism.

Now, as Iranians risk everything for the chance to breathe, Trump’s words stand as a dividing line. On one side are those who believe people are meant to be free. On the other are those who believe stability is worth any number of graves.

The streets of Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, and Tabriz are writing history in real time. Every chant is a referendum. Every fallen protester is a witness. The question is not whether Iran is changing. It is whether the world will have the courage to acknowledge it.

Empires do not fall in a day. They crack. They groan. They fracture. Then, suddenly, what seemed eternal is gone. The Soviet Union collapsed not because it lost a war, but because its people stopped believing in its lies. The Berlin Wall fell not because diplomats negotiated it away, but because ordinary citizens walked toward it.

Iran is at that threshold.

Trump’s declaration does not guarantee victory. But it restores moral direction. It tells the oppressed that their suffering is not invisible. It tells the tyrant that his narrative is no longer accepted. It tells history that America, at least under one leader, remembers the difference between order and justice.

Freedom is never polite. It is disruptive. It is noisy. It is dangerous to those who profit from chains. And it always begins with a voice that refuses to whisper.

What terrifies the rulers in Tehran is not American power. It is American conviction. Missiles can be deterred. Sanctions can be evaded. But a moral stance cannot be negotiated away. When Trump declares that Iran deserves new leadership, he is not merely making a policy statement. He is revoking the regime’s moral camouflage. He is telling the world that mass murderers cannot hide behind culture, sovereignty, or tradition.

Every empire built on fear eventually faces the same moment. The people stop asking for permission to exist. They stop begging for crumbs. They stop believing the myths. That moment is now unfolding in Iran.

The chants echoing through Iranian cities are not foreign. They are ancient. They are the same cries heard in Warsaw, in Prague, in Budapest, in Berlin. They are the universal language of the human soul rejecting captivity. They say: we were not born to kneel. We were not created to be property of clerics. We are more than subjects. We are a people.

The regime’s response exposes its fragility. A confident government does not shut down the internet. It does not deploy snipers against teenagers. It does not build gallows in bulk. Those are the acts of rulers who know their time is limited. Tyranny becomes most violent when it senses its end.

This is why the admission from Khamenei is so revealing. For decades, the Islamic Republic pretended to be invincible. It boasted of divine favor. It portrayed dissent as marginal. Now its supreme leader stands before cameras and acknowledges that thousands are dead. He does not apologize. He does not repent. He simply admits the scale. In doing so, he confesses weakness.

A regime that must massacre thousands to survive is already dying.

Trump’s critics accuse him of “interfering.” But interference is precisely what tyrants demand in their favor. Every trade deal that enriches them, every diplomatic smile that legitimizes them, every agreement that extends their lifespan is interference on behalf of oppression. Silence is not neutrality. It is alliance with power.

Trump’s stance is different. He aligns not with a government, but with a people.

This is why his message resonates far beyond Iran. Dissidents in Cuba hear it. Christians in Nigeria hear it. Prisoners in North Korea hear it. Farmers under cartel rule in Latin America hear it. When the leader of the most powerful nation on earth says that legitimacy flows from the governed, not from guns, it reorders the moral landscape.

For too long, the West has been ashamed of its own principles. It speaks of values in private and compromises them in public. It fears being called judgmental more than it fears being complicit. Trump has no such fear. He understands that a civilization unwilling to defend its ideals will eventually lose them.

The Iranian regime’s ideology is not merely anti-American. It is anti-human. It teaches that obedience is virtue and freedom is corruption. It reduces women to symbols and men to instruments. It glorifies martyrdom while denying life. It weaponizes faith to justify cruelty.

Such a system cannot be reformed at the edges. It must be replaced.

That does not mean tanks tomorrow. It means truth today. It means economic pressure. It means diplomatic isolation. It means refusing to launder tyranny through polite language. It means standing with those who stand in the street with nothing but their voices.

The Iranian protesters are not asking for American soldiers. They are asking not to be abandoned. They are asking that the world not trade their blood for convenience. They are asking that when they are beaten, jailed, and buried, someone remembers why.

Trump remembers.

This is the essence of leadership. Not managing decline, but confronting injustice. Not preserving appearances, but asserting reality. Not hiding behind process, but acting with purpose.

There will be those who say this is dangerous. That it risks war. That it destabilizes. But tyranny is already war. It is war against truth. War against conscience. War against the future. Stability built on graves is not peace. It is a pause between screams.

Every great transformation begins with a fracture in the narrative. The French Revolution began when people stopped believing in divine monarchy. The American Revolution began when colonists stopped believing submission was destiny. The fall of communism began when citizens stopped believing the party was eternal.

Iran’s revolution begins when its people stop believing the mullahs are inevitable.

Trump’s words accelerate that disbelief.

The regime can censor the internet, but it cannot censor memory. It can jail bodies, but it cannot jail ideas. It can kill protesters, but it cannot kill the question now planted in millions of minds: Why must we live this way?

That question is fatal to despotism.

This is why the clerics rage. This is why state television lies. This is why propaganda floods every channel. They are no longer arguing from strength. They are pleading from fear.

The future belongs to those who believe in it.

America was not built by those who accepted their chains. It was built by men who crossed oceans and faced empires. It was forged by farmers who took up arms and declared that liberty was worth more than safety. It survived because generations believed that freedom is not granted. It is claimed.

Trump stands in that lineage.

His call for new leadership in Iran is not an act of imperialism. It is an affirmation of a universal truth: no regime has the right to exist at the expense of its people’s humanity.

The Iranian people are not asking to be ruled by America. They are asking to rule themselves.

That aspiration terrifies every tyrant on earth.

There will be setbacks. Revolutions are not linear. Courage rises and falls. Fear returns. Blood is spilled. But once the veil is torn, it cannot be restored. Once people see their rulers as mortal, the spell is broken.

Iran’s streets have seen that truth.

Trump’s voice has amplified it.

The world now stands at a crossroads. One path leads back to the familiar rituals of appeasement. Back to summits and statements. Back to pretending that mass graves are internal matters. The other path leads forward, toward a world that remembers that governments exist to serve life, not consume it.

This moment will be studied. Children will read about it. They will ask who spoke when it mattered. Who stood with the voiceless. Who hid.

History does not reward caution in the face of evil. It honors those who draw lines.

Trump has drawn one.

On one side stands tyranny, cloaked in scripture and soaked in blood. On the other stands a simple, dangerous idea: that people are born free.

The Iranian people have chosen their side.

So has Donald J. Trump.

The rest of the world must now decide whether it will merely watch—or finally remember what it once claimed to be.