The Trump administration stumbled a bit out of the gate with its response to the ongoing anti-government protests in Iran, but quickly recovered with strong expressions of support for peaceful protesters and condemnation of the Iranian regime. After a day of silence on Friday, a State Department spokesman replied to a request for comment by THE WEEKLY STANDARD shortly after 5 p.m. with “We don’t have anything to share [at] this time, but will release a statement [in] the normal fashion if we do decide to release something.” Less than half an hour later, the State Department released the following:
The silence from the White House, however, continued after the release by the State Department. Shortly after 6:30 p.m., a National Security Council spokesman replied to an inquiry from TWS saying that a brief statement would be put out “shortly” and that White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders would be tweeting it.
At 7:52 p.m., Sanders tweeted:
Late Friday night, Trump echoed Sanders’ tweet with his own:
The first U.S. political response to the situation in Iran actually came from Arkansas senator Tom Cotton almost a full day earlier. Cotton put out a statement on Thursday calling attention to the protests and to the failure of the Iranian government to provide even “basic needs” for its citizens. House Speaker Paul Ryan eventually tweeted his response Friday afternoon supporting the protesters and criticizing the regime for “propping up terrorist organizations[.]”
On the Democratic side, however, neither House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi or Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have issued any statements yet, and Congressman Tim Walz of Minnesota did not mention the situation in Iran in the Democrat’s weekly address on Friday.
The current protests in Iran began on Thursday, but news of the unrest was slow to filter out until the following day. Then cellphone videos, mostly via Twitter, and other social media reports began to multiply throughout the day on Friday giving the world a peek into the oppressive Islamic state. What ostensibly began as complaints about jobs and economic conditions began to spread and morph into broader expressions of dissatisfaction with the regime that has held sway in Iran since 1979.
President Trump’s response to the situation will likely be under a microscope given the tepid response of the Obama administration to the Green Movement in Iran in 2009, which was subsequently crushed by the regime on Valentines Day 2010.
