By Roger L Simon
Eli Lake wrote a column (April 15) for The Free Press— “Trump Should Negotiate for Iranian Freedom, Not Just Nuclear Promises”—that powerfully resonated with me.
I don’t know why I, from the relative safety of Miami Beach, worry so much about the fate of the Iranian protestors, but I do. Perhaps it’s because I met a few of the formerly incarcerated from the 2009 demonstrations when Sheryl and I were working on our screenplay, “Keys to Paradise.” Their faces, bashed-in from the most hideous torture, resembled Picasso’s from his Cubist Period. Many of their colleagues didn’t make it that far.
According to Mr. Lake’s article, an estimated 50,000 protestors now languish in those same Iranian jails, including the notorious Evin Prison, where women were ritually raped by guards the night before their execution to ensure they wouldn’t go to heaven.
Tens of thousands of demonstrators have been shot dead, either in the streets or in their hospital beds. Many more, millions probably, are on regime lists as state enemies.
We can only imagine their fates if nothing is done after the war is over. The photo below was taken of the cleanup after the January demonstrations.
Our president knows all this. As most of us remember, he is the one who proclaimed, “Help is on the way!”
Is it?
Or is help only on the way for the mullah remnants about whom Mr. Trump said today, “Iran wants to make a deal, and we’re dealing very nicely with them. We’ve got to have no nuclear weapons. That’s a big factor, and they’re willing to do things today that they weren’t willing to do two months ago.”
Exactly what “things,” other than nuclear, Mr. Trump means is hard to say, although we have heard rumors. His words are often deliberately meant to obfuscate, driving the press into knots, which chooses to take him literally for its own purposes. Was he talking about the putative ceasefire in Lebanon just announced today, which one of my favorite sources, Tousi TV, has analyzed and unmasked?
Few doubt, I certainly don’t, that Trump is a master negotiator. We don’t know what he has up his sleeve, and that’s probably for the best, given our media and the political opposition. Both often seem to be rooting for the Iranian theocracy to win, or at best have mixed reactions to it, as Thomas Friedman of the NY Times admitted the other day. Mr. Friedman would like to see a free Iran, but is extremely upset that Trump might be the one getting the credit.
The Iranian regime loves to stall and did so successfully against previous administrations, including those beloved by Mr. Friedman. The mullahs have the advantage of being a fascist theocracy with illusory elections and therefore are able to wait out democracies. And they don’t have all that long to wait, slightly more than two years, when their nemesis, Donald J. Trump, is gone.
Mr. Trump clearly knows that. He knows, too, that much of Western Europe is not on his side. Most importantly, he knows a midterm election is coming up, with multiple forces lined up to bring him down. The conventional wisdom is that he must bring the war to a halt soon to lift the stock market, lower inflation, and lower gas prices.
Some of that is already done, but he knows the opposition will lie about it anyway.
Further adding to his troubles, several members of the extreme right, formerly his supposed friends and allies, are now in a nonstop social media war with him, claiming he is not sufficiently “America First” and is being led around by Israel when his well-documented enmity for the Islamic Regime goes back to 1979.
In other words, Donald Trump is in a Catch-22 of sorts between a need to keep MAGA going domestically and a natural desire to free the benighted Iranian people.
Can he do both?
Call me overly optimistic, and many do, but I believe he can, and probably is. He can at least move forward on both fronts simultaneously and significantly to a point where a worthy successor can take over. (Who that would be is not yet clear, but I lean to the Secretary of State.)
It has long been said that if there is to be a freedom revolution in Iran, it must come from the Iranian people themselves. Nevertheless, they have a need for weapons and, no doubt, other means of support.
One of the latter is the apparently successful naval blockade that could bankrupt the regime without excessive harm to that country’s infrastructure.
As for weaponry, we had hints that something was being attempted from Trump’s harsh words for the once-loved Kurds for husbanding (Bogarting?) clandestine arms shipments intended for the freedom fighters.
Many of us who have been rooting for the Iranian people to overthrow their leaders were heartened by the recent report that on the night of April 14-15, 2026, a Basij commander named Mohammad Shirmohammadian was stabbed multiple times (often cited as 14) and killed by masked attackers near Pardis, a suburb of Tehran.
Is this the beginning of something? It has often been said that the one thing the regime leadership fears, even more than Donald Trump, is its own people.
Nevertheless, I’m rooting for Trump to handle this balancing act while working to minimize the blood in the streets.
As for those self-described “America Firsters” who say we should pull out and leave the still-unarmed Iranians to their fate, all I can do is remind them of the famous poem by John Donne about no man being an island. Isolationism may have its short-run attractions, but not much longer, it can turn around and bite off all our limbs.
“America First” should also mean “Humanity First.” That’s the moral path for one nation under God.
First published in American Refugees
