Eric Lichtblau: Trump lauds Iran’s ‘Patriots’ but calls fellow Americans ‘enemies’ | Opinion

If only President Donald Trump cared as much about the civil rights of protesters in the streets of America as he does about the protesters in the streets of Iran.

The insulting double standard in Trump’s worldview is on full display right now as he threatens, not for the first time in an American city, to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring in the military to Minnesota in a move sure to further inflame an already combustible situation there.

In Trump’s view, the throngs of residents now protesting in Minneapolis – outraged over Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s occupation of their city in the wake of the killing of resident Renee Good – are “anarchists and professional agitators,” (even though there’s no evidence they’re being paid). Trump warned Jan. 15 that he would take action himself if Minnesota doesn’t stop the “insurrectionists” from interfering with ICE and “put an end to the travesty that is taking place.”

Contrast that incendiary language with Trump’s approach to the ongoing protests in Tehran, where he sent a message of international support to “Iranian Patriots” via his social media site and urged them: ‘’KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!”

And he shared a video with his followers of a protester tearing down an Iranian flag at the embassy in London – just the kind of antiestablishment act that he surely would have denounced had it happened in the streets of Minnesota at an ICE rally.

The big difference between the two situations, of course, is that Trump sees fellow Americans protesting on the streets of Minneapolis as his “enemies,” while the Iranian protesters, waging a popular uprising against a country that is America’s archenemy, are not. Pumping up the Iranians’ right to protest doesn’t take much political moxie for Trump.

Trump urged on the Tehran protesters and threatened a crackdown on the Minneapolis protesters in Truth Social posts barely an hour apart last week. Whether he appreciates the horrible irony in those split-screen messages isn’t clear.

The president isn’t a man known for nuanced thinking, and with his administration threatening to take over Greenland, cleaning up a military attack in Venezuela and opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Trump did have a busy week.

For Trump, a bedrock constitutional principle like the right to public protest is purely transactional, necessary only when it works to his advantage: His own supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in violent protest were “patriots,” while the people in Minneapolis protesting the killing of a woman rashly branded by Trump’s administration as a domestic terrorist are lefty lawbreakers.

He has shown his overlord’s disdain for public protests again and again, at least when it comes to those on American soil, where polls show he is ever more unpopular.

Remember that after the massive “No Kings” rallies against the president last fall in cities and towns nationwide, Trump posted a computer-generated video that showed him in a crown flying a fighter jet labeled “King Trump” and dumping mounds of apparent feces on peaceful protesters in Times Square.

It’s not just the right to political protest at grave risk under Trump; it’s been a terrible time for the First Amendment in general.

The crackdown on the Minnesota protests came just as the FBI was raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter with a search warrant and seizing her phone and two laptops in a federal leak investigation that Trump said involved Venezuela. It was a rare, if not unprecedented, break from past Justice Department procedures that understandably alarmed free-press advocates as a major escalation of Trump’s day-to-day assaults on the media.

At the same time, a federal judge in Boston on Jan. 15 called Trump an “authoritarian” ruler because of his administration’s efforts to deport foreign, pro-Palestinian college activists who have been critical of Israel in the Gaza conflict.

Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, said that he found the administration’s quashing of free expression in the case “appalling,” and that Trump and some senior aides “are not honoring the First Amendment.”

For that, you might be better off protesting in the streets of Iran these days.

Eric Lichtblau, a journalist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is the author of “American Reich: A Murder in Orange County, Neo-Nazis, and a New Age of Hate,” released Jan. 6.