After a wave of anti-government protests throughout Iran, President Trump took aim at the Iranian regime.
Trump – who has clashed with Irannian President Hassan Rouhani in recent days as the protests have continued – opened 2018 with a Twitter broadside at Tehran’s authoritarian mullahs. Iran “is failing at every level despite” the controversial nuclear deal the Obama administration made with Iran in 2015, Trump tweeted.
“The great Iranian people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry tor food [and] for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being looted,” Trump said. “TIME FOR CHANGE!”
The deal Trump referenced included the Obama administration’s unfreezing of more than $100 billion in Iranian assets and cash payments of more than $1 billion for Iran’s pledge not to pursue nuclear weapons for at least 10 years.
On the streets of Iran, thousands have called for the theocratic regime to end, in a reprise of the so-called “Green Movement” of 2009, when protesters clashed over elections and called fruitlessly on the U.S. to support their cause. That protest movement ended with the arrest of hundreds of students, political figures and dissidents.
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