Trump’s ‘Regime Change’ Swerve
Our take
In a recent edition of The Atlantic Daily, the complexities of President Trump’s shifting narrative regarding regime change in Iran come into sharp focus. The article details how Trump has not only pivoted from his earlier anti-interventionist stance but has also engaged in a dramatic rebranding of ongoing military efforts in the region. It’s a stark contrast to his campaign rhetoric, where he declared a commitment to moving away from the “failed policy of nation building and regime change.” This contradiction raises important questions about the motivations behind his current rhetoric and strategies. As previously discussed in Critics Have a New Way to Describe the Trump Administration and What the Markets Tell Trump, it appears that Trump is now embracing a narrative that frames military aggression as a form of progress.
Trump's recent claims of multiple regime changes in Iran, despite the reality of ongoing governance under the same theocratic system, illustrate a broader tendency to manipulate language for political gain. By declaring that the Iranian government is “far more reasonable” and that significant progress has been made, Trump aims to project an image of victory amidst escalating conflict. However, the article underscores the fact that the leadership in Iran remains largely unchanged, and any new appointments are merely continuations of existing power structures. This misrepresentation serves not only to bolster his administration’s image but also to provide a façade of success in a conflict that many perceive as historically unpopular and unmanageable.
Moreover, the implications of Trump's rhetoric extend beyond Iran. His recent actions hint at a broader strategy that includes destabilizing other governments, such as in Cuba, reflecting a return to interventionist policies that he previously criticized. This paradox raises a fundamental question about the consistency of his foreign policy objectives. While Trump may attempt to project strength through a narrative of regime change, the reality is that such assertions often mask deeper strategic failures. The article emphasizes that true regime change would require not only the removal of key figures but also a significant shift in governance and policy—something that remains elusive, even as military operations continue.
As we look ahead, it is crucial to consider what these developments mean for international relations and the stability of the Middle East. Will Trump’s administration be able to navigate the complex realities of regime change, or will they continue to grapple with the consequences of a military strategy that lacks clear objectives? As the situation evolves, one must remain skeptical of the narrative being presented and attentive to the underlying dynamics at play in these geopolitical tensions. The conversation around regime change is far from over, and its implications will undoubtedly affect not just U.S.-Iran relations, but also global perceptions of American foreign policy moving forward.
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According to President Trump, Iran has undergone not one, but two regime changes already this year—and the new government is far more “reasonable” than its predecessors. “The one regime was decimated, destroyed, they’re all dead. The next regime is mostly dead,” he told reporters on Air Force One this weekend. “And the third regime, we’re dealing with different people than anybody’s dealt with before.”
Trump and his Cabinet have been warming to the phrase regime change since the start of his second term. It’s a marked shift from what he campaigned on. As far back as his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, he was calling for the country to “abandon the failed policy of nation building and regime change,” and he reiterated those views in his most recent bid for reelection. Last year, around the time Trump decided to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, he called those two words “not politically correct,” seeming to understand their rhetorical link to America’s failed “forever wars” during the 2000s and 2010s. Yet in the same Truth Social post, he started coming around to the phrase: “But if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!” In the weeks leading up to last month’s attack on Iran, Trump said that regime change would be “the best thing that could happen” to the country.
With his comments this weekend, Trump is casting regime change as a mark of progress in the war. He is signaling—perhaps in the hope of calming down oil markets—that the United States has already achieved an important victory. At the same time, he’s dramatically escalating the conflict in other ways, threatening the complete destruction of some of Iran’s most crucial energy infrastructure as the Pentagon prepares for weeks of ground operations. But regime change hasn’t actually happened. Although American and Israeli attacks have taken out key Iranian leaders, their replacements are still very much part of the existing system.
Iran’s supreme leader is now the cleric Mojtaba Khamenei, a son of former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated late last month. Other officials who have been killed, such as the heads of the Supreme National Security Council and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, have been replaced via the typical governmental channels—that is, by the Iranian president and his associates. (Trump has claimed that Mojtaba is seriously wounded, but on Sunday, the Iranian government transmitted a defiant message, purportedly written by him, through state media.) Iran’s government is the same theocracy it has been since the revolution of 1979 and the overthrow of the shah. That any of these new appointees have meaningfully different attitudes toward the U.S. than past leaders did is, despite Trump’s assurances, far from certain.
People often use regime to refer to the government of a single political leader—particularly one they dislike, or who was not elected democratically—but as my colleague David Graham helpfully explained last week, regime actually refers to a system of governance that doesn’t always change when the head of state does. “One could argue,” he wrote, “that the U.S. has had the same ‘regime’ since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president.” Arash Azizi, a scholar of Iranian history and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, told me that “the war and decapitations have affected the internal factional balance, but they haven’t changed the regime. There is arguably even more regime cohesion now than there was before the war.”
As for what an actual regime change in Iran might look like, Azizi said that it “would include either an unraveling of the Islamic Republic’s core structures or, at the very least, abandonment of its key policies. I think this is likely in the medium term (and it would have been even without the war)”—the regime’s signature policies are both unpopular in Iran and strategically untenable, Azizi explained—“but nothing of the sort has happened yet.” In other words, Trump is misusing the phrase to project an image of success in this historically unpopular war.
The Trump administration has offered an abundance of conflicting explanations for its goals in Iran—10 rationales in the first six days of the war alone, my colleagues Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl have noted. But the president’s recent actions have underscored his rejection of the anti-interventionist values he campaigned on. In addition to escalating the conflict in Iran, he has sought to destabilize other foreign governments over the past few months: After the January capture of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (and the subsequent installation of a Trump-approved interim leader), the White House established its first effective oil blockade against Cuba since the Cuban missile crisis. Despite slightly softening the blockade in recent days, there’s no indication that Trump has backed down from his stated goal of ousting Cuban leadership and ushering in a more pro-American government.
Perhaps Trump really will carry out regime change in Iran. As my colleague Nancy Youssef wrote earlier today, there are still many paths this war could take—and no military strategist would ever advise determining the outcome of a war just a few weeks in. But in the meantime, there’s plenty of reason to be skeptical about Trump’s assessment of how things are going.
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- Four ways the Iran war could end
Today’s News
- The Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that Colorado’s ban on conversion therapy for minors violates free-speech rights, a decision that could affect similar laws in more than 20 states.
- The U.S. military has begun flying B-52 bombers over Iran for the first time in the war. The move signals that Iranian air defenses may be weakened after weeks of strikes, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Iran can still retaliate with missiles.
- Israel’s defense minister said that its military plans to occupy much of southern Lebanon up to the Litani River after its ground invasion ends, and that displaced residents will be barred from returning for the time being.
Evening Read
What Maxxing Reveals About Life Online
By Ian Bogost
Perhaps you’ve heard of looksmaxxing, the online trend in which young men strive to become supposedly attractive, often through self-harm. Thanks to Clavicular, a young, fringe manosphere influencer, this term—and others modeled after it—has proliferated. You can be a looksmaxxer by soft maxxing (skin care or exercise) or by hard maxxing (plastic surgery or self-mutilation). Looksmaxxers often find themselves jester-maxxing, that is, using humor to gain the attention of women.
Maxxing can be specialized, too, and even modest, maximally speaking. A dude might be personality-maxxing instead of jester-maxxing. Less incel-maxxing versions might entail health-maxxing—what people called wellness approximately 10 minutes ago. Want your gut to be more regular? That’s fiber-maxxing. Want to build bulk? You’re protein-maxxing. Some so-called tradfem women want to bear more children through fertility-maxxing—a process our culture once understood as getting pregnant again. Maxxing goes the other way too, maximizing harm instead of benefit: Maybe you’ve got a drug habit, in which case you might be pill-maxxing. Anorexia, for some, is now starve-maxxing.
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- Critics Have a New Way to Describe the Trump AdministrationThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Critics have used many phrases to describe Donald Trump’s presidency, some of them unprintable. Scholars and journalists have debated whether Trump’s approach is “authoritarian,” “white supremacist,” or “fascist.” More recently, however, a growing number of people have begun referring to the “Trump regime.” “The Trump regime has proven over and over,” The New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote, that its morality is “the advantage of the stronger.” A fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute complained that oversight tools “were effectively destroyed by the Trump regime last year.” And a writer for The Nation called for Democrats to “launch a ‘Nuremberg Caucus’ to investigate the crimes of the Trump regime.” Google Trends shows that although the phrase was occasionally deployed during Trump’s first term, it has become far more common over the past year. These usages are meant to tell us something about the state of contemporary politics in the United States—although exactly what is not always clear. Ambrose Bierce, the sardonic author of The Devil’s Dictionary, might have observed that a “regime” is any government that one doesn’t like. Those referring to the “Trump regime” this way seem to be implying that the administration is rapacious and authoritarian. But few of them are explicit about that, and their counterparts in the academy indulge in the same vagueness. “Very rarely do regime analysts stop to define what they mean by political regime,” the political scientist Gerardo L. Munck complained in 1996. The word was popularized in American politics as a sort of euphemism: During the George W. Bush presidency, regime change was a bloodless, technocratic term for the bloody, chaotic effort to topple Saddam Hussein and install a democratic system of government in Iraq. A good working definition, Munck told me in an email, is “the set of rules that regulate how people come to occupy government offices and how government decisions are made.” But even scholars often employ the term as a pejorative, used to describe authoritarian government. These “regimes” tend to have two main characteristics, sometimes overlapping though also in tension: first, the personalization of government around a single individual, and second, a set of informal power structures, such as business oligarchs or a “deep state,” that operate outside of the formal system of government. One could argue that the U.S. has had the same “regime” since 1789, when the Constitution entered into force and George Washington became president. Alternatively, one could look to moments such as the post–Civil War amendments or the New Deal as shifts in the regime. Either way, to state that Trump oversees a regime is to suggest an epochal change. That’s how Robert Reich sees it. Reich, a commentator and professor who served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, has been one of the most consistent and prominent users of the phrase. “I began referring to the Trump ‘regime’ rather than ‘administration’ because, especially in his second term, Trump has acted more like an authoritarian ruler than a president in a constitutional system of governance,” he wrote to me in an email. “This is no ‘administration’ that manages the executive branch by implementing the will of Congress, as expressed by the citizens of the United States.” I thought that perhaps scholars of regime systems would push back on using the label for Trump’s government, but the ones I spoke with cautiously endorsed it. “In the past, it was common to refer to the Pinochet regime in Chile or the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq,” Munck said. He told me that the use of Trump regime “is a correct appreciation, that highlights a key weakness in the current state of democracy in the U.S.” And Licia Cianetti, a political scientist who recently co-authored a paper on defining the word, wrote to me that “the personalisation of Trump’s style of rule, and some features like its oligarchization, make the use of ‘regime’ in this pejorative sense expedient to express what seems to be happening to American democracy.” Without downplaying the dangers that Trump poses to the American way of government (perils that The Atlantic has been aggressive in describing), I am not ready to join the “Trump regime” crew yet. One reason is that regimes can be resilient—a point that, ironically, Trump’s actions have demonstrated. “We have, really, regime change,” Trump said about Iran this week. “This is a change in the regime because the leaders are all very different.” That’s nonsense. 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- What the Markets Tell TrumpThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On Friday, after almost a full month of bombing Iran, Donald Trump offered a glimpse of the end. American military operations in the country, he said, could soon be “winding down.” A day later, he swerved, giving Iran an ultimatum: Should its leaders refuse to lift their effective blockade on the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, unfreezing much of the world’s oil, he would “obliterate” the nation’s energy infrastructure. Then, yesterday morning, another swerve: Following “productive” diplomatic talks, Trump would postpone the deadline until Friday. Never mind the fact that Iran has denied that any such talks took place. The president hasn’t always been clear about what he wants from this war—or how he plans to mitigate the energy crisis it has created. At one point, he suggested that the spike in oil prices might actually be a good thing, because “we” could stand to “make a lot of money.” That’s true for oil producers, although not exactly a counter to all of the negative effects of a global energy shock. But the timing of this ultimatum and the timing of its subsequent deferral are revealing in their own way. Oil-futures markets don’t trade from Friday to Sunday evening. Because Trump’s threat to Iran arrived on a Saturday night, speculators had a short buffer—a little less than a day—to assess the potential price impact before trading resumed. And the reprieve, which lasts exactly five days, will conclude as markets head into the weekend pause. The persistent rise of U.S. Treasury yields, coupled with the news yesterday morning that Asia’s markets (which start trading before Western markets) had plummeted after the ultimatum, probably also contributed to the postponement. 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