President Trump had a ringing message of solidarity on Tuesday for demonstrators in the streets. “KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he wrote on social media. He decried “the senseless killing of protesters,” and added that those pulling the triggers “will pay a big price.”
He meant the protesters in Tehran, not Minneapolis. By contrast, the people in the streets of Minnesota, he wrote just 63 minutes earlier, were “anarchists and professional agitators” trying to cover up a fraud scandal. He vowed that “THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!”
The eruption of protests on opposite sides of the planet at this moment in history has brought Mr. Trump’s views of democracy and popular dissent into stark relief. The situations in Iran and Minnesota, of course, are different and complicated, but the president’s rule of thumb seems simple enough: Those who take to the streets supporting a cause he favors are laudable heroes. Those who take to the streets to oppose him are illegitimate radicals.
Mr. Trump discussed possible military strikes in response to the brutal and deadly crackdown on protesters in Iran, even as he has dismissed concerns about the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minnesota. While he vowed that “help is on its way” to Iranian protesters, his administration moved to block outside inquiries into the Minneapolis killing, which he appeared to rationalize because Ms. Good had been “disrespectful” to federal officers.
“He frames each protest movement in terms of himself,” said Amy Hawthorne, a former State Department official and longtime scholar of democracy issues in the Middle East. “He justifies state violence against protesters who challenge him or his policies, and promises protection when he thinks demonstrators can hurt his adversaries.”
The support for a popular uprising in Iran also comes as Mr. Trump has abandoned democracy proponents in Venezuela. While he ordered a special forces raid to capture President Nicolás Maduro on drug charges, Mr. Trump left the rest of the repressive regime in place, dismissed the leading opposition leader as irrelevant and declared that he himself would run the country rather than hold elections any time soon.
While Mr. Trump finally agreed to meet on Thursday with María Corina Machado, the opposition leader he said “doesn’t have the respect” to govern Venezuela, Mr. Trump has made clear his real interest in the South American country is seizing its oil, not freeing its people.
Presidential support for democracy and human rights abroad has long been selective. During the Cold War, presidents routinely castigated communist governments aligned with Moscow and turned a blind eye to the abuses of dictatorships on the U.S. side of the struggle with the Soviet Union.
But rarely has it been as situational as it has been under Mr. Trump. He denounces tyranny in places like Iran and Cuba but not in Russia or China.
He once assailed Ukraine’s democratically elected president as a “dictator without elections,” and has chastised European democracies for being insufficiently tolerant of right-wing movements. But the president told oppressive Arab states where internal opposition is forbidden (and where his family does business) that the United States would no longer be “giving you lectures on how to live.”
That is a realpolitik that might have challenged even former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, the legendary master of unsentimental geopolitics.