The death toll in Iran’s rising. And Donald Trump’s patience, which is thin on stoic days, is waning.

I should reiterate, up front, that Trump doesn’t care a thing about promoting democracy in Iran, nor anywhere else in the world for that matter.

This is a man who sidelined the democratic opposition in Venezuela in order to ensure US access to the country’s oil reserves following the capture of Nicolas Maduro and who, on the domestic front, deputized America’s immigration officials as his own, personal paramilitary outfit and trampled the rule of law at every opportunity in 2025.

So, when Trump says thing like, “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before” and “The USA stands ready to help!!!,” as he did over the weekend, it’s disingenuous, or at least hypocritical.

Iran says the protesters killed by its security forces over two weeks of increasingly violent demonstrations are law-breaking vandals who deserve what they get. Trump said more or less the same thing about those who participated in looting during 2020’s racial justice protests and so far anyway, there’s no indication the administration intends to offer anything other than a full-throated defense of the ICE agent who shot and killed a US citizen in broad daylight last week.

Trump likes democracy when it works out for him domestically (e.g., in November of 2016 and 2024), or when defending it abroad serves his purposes and/or advances his conception of American interests. So, he’s not “lying” exactly when he says his administration’s excited about the prospect of a democratic Iran. Rather, he’s leaving out the part where that excitement has nothing to do with democracy as an ideal and everything to do with wanting to see an uncooperative regime ousted in the hope that whatever replaces it will be more amenable to American influence.

According to Washington-based HRANA, a human rights group, at least 110 people have been killed over 14 days of protests in Iran, where demonstrators have shown up at nearly 600 locations in 185 cities across all 31 provinces. Arrests number in the thousands.

Information gathering’s hampered by the regime’s efforts to cut the country off from the internet and phone service, but it’s now plain that the Basij and other police personnel are firing live ammunition at demonstrators.

The Wall Street Journal interviewed a surgeon from Ilam who said he “removed two bullets consistent with a Kalashnikov” from the back of a 50-year-old protester who’d “also been hit by 40 birdshot pellets.”

The New York Times spoke to a 35-year-old resident of Tehran who said she personally witnessed police “open[ing] fire [on] a middle-aged man and his teenage son, killing the father,” apparently because he reached down to “fix his shoe.” (The officers might’ve mistakenly believed he had a gun in his boot.)

And on and on. There are countless such accounts emanating from the country, which speaks to how difficult it is to cut a nation off from the rest of the world in the 21st century.

Still, experts describe Iran’s efforts to quell the protests by way of a communications blackout as unprecedented both in scope and sophistication. “There’s no reception on the phones. There’s no antenna. It’s like you are living in the middle of nowhere,” one researcher told The Guardian, adding that the regime’s even managed to jam Elon Musk’s Starlink in some neighborhoods.

Some messages are getting through to cell phones, though. The Journal reviewed mass texts sent to Iranians from the regime’s security apparatus which implored citizens to spy on one another and, chillingly, “inform your children about the consequences of treason against the country.”

Over the weekend, the IRGC said it intends to get involved, which is to say that as of Saturday, the protesters were on notice that they’d be contending with the military going forward, not just the police and the Basij. In a statement, the IRGC warned it’ll “firmly” protect Iran’s “national interests, strategic infrastructure, and public property” from what it described as an Israeli “plot.”

In a show of both force and desperation, masked regime personnel were seen riding motorcycles through the streets and firing guns into the sky as a warning, while other videos depicted uniformed officers shooting randomly at buildings, apparently to dissuade locals from protest activity. Other reports suggest the IRGC’s attempting to choke off movement by cutting off road lights and stopping vehicles.

This isn’t sustainable. It ends in one of two ways (and I’m not advocating for one or the other): Either the regime kills enough people that Iranians decide, for the third time in six years, that it just isn’t worth it, or Iranians decide this is it and overrun the military, the security forces and, ultimately, the theocracy.

I don’t know which is more likely, but this time does feel a bit different. As one young woman interviewed by the Times put it, “Everyone is anticipating the violence to increase, but you know what? Everyone still is going out to protest.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s reportedly been briefed on “a range” of military options for assisting the protesters “including strikes on nonmilitary sites in Tehran.” When asked late last week about his previous threat to intervene, Trump said, “if they start killing people like they have in the past, we will get involved.”

On Sunday, Khamenei resorted to the usual rhetoric. “The US President, who judges the entire world with arrogance, should know that tyrants like the Pharaoh, Nimrod and the Pahlavi Dynasty, were overthrown at the height of their pride,” he said.