Trump implores Iranians to ‘rise up and fight’ as he shrugs off ‘worthless’ talks

"Rise up and fight" is a hell of a thing for an American president to post while B-2s are still refueling. Trump has never been shy about saying the quiet part out loud, and here it is: this isn't really about talks anymore. He said so himself, calling negotiations "worthless" even as CENTCOM was announcing another round of strikes. That's at least honest, which is more than you can say for the last three administrations that pretended sanctions and diplomacy were ever going to change the nature of the regime in Tehran.

But honesty isn't the same as a plan. Telling Iranians to rise up against a government that has spent forty-five years perfecting the art of crushing dissent is easy to type and brutally hard to survive if you're the one doing it. We remember 2009. We remember 2022. Both times Iranians took to the streets, both times Washington offered warm words and not much else, and both times the regime came out the other side more paranoid and more violent than before. If this is a call to arms, people deserve to know what backs it up beyond airstrikes on regime targets.

There's a version of this moment that actually serves American interests: hit the nuclear infrastructure, hit the missile sites, make clear the price of attacking U.S. forces is unbearable, and let the Iranian people decide their own future without pretending we're their liberation army. There's another version where tough talk substitutes for strategy and we end up owning outcomes we can't control. Trump's instincts on Iran have generally been sharper than his predecessors', mainly because he doesn't flinch. The test now is whether "worthless talks" gets followed by a real objective, not just a slogan Tehran can use to rally its own people against us.