Several prominent Republicans who count themselves among the “America First” MAGA movement have been cheering on protesters in Iran who have opposed their country’s repressive regime. At the same time, those GOP officials have condemned and castigated American protesters who oppose President Donald Trump’s increasingly authoritarian administration.
Trump himself is the biggest culprit when it comes to this contradiction, having previously expressed support for protesters in Iran while he and his administration spread lies about and issued threats toward protesters in Minneapolis.
But that dissonance between expressions of support for Iranian protesters and expressions of contempt for American protesters exercising their First Amendment rights is fairly standard for some GOP lawmakers.
Take Ted Cruz, for example. The Texas senator recently attacked Alex Pretti, the man who was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis last weekend, for carrying a gun at the time of his death. Video of the incident shows that Pretti, who was in legal possession of a firearm, didn’t brandish the gun, as the Trump administration claimed, before he was pinned to the ground and shot multiple times. Cruz told his podcast listeners this week that “if you have a firearm, the odds of that confrontation escalating rise dramatically.” He added, “We are seeing, sadly, leftists targeting ICE agents for murder. And if you have that firearm and you’re engaged in violence, the agent’s perception of the physical threat to them is understandably much, much higher.” (Cruz offered no examples of “leftists” having targeted ICE agents “for murder,” and Pretti wasn’t “engaged in violence” when he was killed.)
The Republican’s call for American citizens to disarm when they engage in public protest was in direct contrast with another call he made this week, to arm Iran’s protesters.
“We should be arming the protesters in Iran. NOW,” Cruz wrote in a post on X. “For the Iranian people to overthrow the Ayatollah — a tyrant who routinely chants ‘death to America’ — would make America much, much safer.” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham is another official who has attacked demonstrators in Minnesota repeatedly, even going so far as to blame them for the Pretti shooting because “recent physical and verbal assaults on ICE and Border Patrol agents have led to a very dangerous situation.” (This ignores the fact that so-called verbal assaults are not a justification for taking a person’s life, and neither the fatal shooting of Pretti nor the earlier shooting of Renee Good involved any kind of physical assault on immigration officers.) Graham took an entirely different tone in support of Iran’s protesters during a Fox News interview this week, issuing a public declaration to the protesters that “Trump has your back” and “help will be on the way.” When it comes to regime change abroad, particularly the potential unseating of Iran’s conservative, authoritarian government, Republicans seem gung-ho in their support of demonstrators. But when it comes to Americans who oppose the conservative, authoritarian agenda that Trump is trying to impose on the U.S., they’re singing an entirely different tune.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
