Leaders in glass regimes shouldn’t throw stones.
As you may have heard by now, the government of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seems to be in real trouble this time; we’ve seen anti-Ayatollah protests in Iran before, but the temperature heated up Friday with growing unrest across the country. The internet has been blacked out, Iranian state TV is showing the chaos, and Reuters reported that the deaths of several police officers were announced by state media overnight.
On Friday, President Donald Trump warned again that, if Iran decides it wants to take problematic action, he wasn’t afraid to act either.
“You better not start shooting because we’ll start shooting too,” said Trump, who authorized strikes that crippled Iran’s nuclear program last summer.
“I just hope the protesters in Iran are going to be safe, because that’s a very dangerous place right now,” he added.
Khamenei, who maintains an active presence on social media despite the near-total blackout of it in Iran, even in the best of times, shot back at Trump and implied that the mighty would fall.
“The US President who judges arrogantly about the whole world should know that tyrants & arrogant rulers of the world, such as Pharaoh, Nimrod, Mohammad Reza [Pahlavi] & other such rulers saw their downfall when they were at the peak of their hubris,” he wrote Friday afternoon.
“He too will fall.”
This may have led to one of the greatest community notes in X history:
The US President who judges arrogantly about the whole world should know that tyrants & arrogant rulers of the world, such as Pharaoh, Nimrod, Mohammad Reza [Pahlavi] & other such rulers saw their downfall when they were at the peak of their hubris. He too will fall.
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) January 9, 2026
“Ali Khameni is a dictator who has ruled for 37 years,” the note read.
“Throughout his tenure, his government has been responsible for several crimes, including human rights abuses against the citizens of Iran, the support for terrorist organizations, and shooting down civilian airliners.”
The last was a pointed reference to the last time the Iranian regime tried to go tit-for-tat with the United States over airstrikes and ended up hitting a Ukrainian airliner instead, killing everyone on board.
In other words: If someone’s hubris is going to make them fall, the 86-year-old Ayatollah hanging on by a thread — both politically and physically — trying to quell unrest even state media can’t cover up seems like a safer bet to go the way of the Pharaoh and the Shah.
Whatever the case, while we might have seen this sort of thing in Iran before, with five major protest outbreaks against the theocracy in Tehran since 1999, this one seems to be the most problematic for Khamenei.
A combination of economic collapse, previous sociopolitical unrest, and the regime’s inability to respond in even the most desultory way to U.S. and Israeli strikes during the 12-Day War last summer, rumors have spread that the Ayatollah and his confidants are looking to decamp to Russia, a popular landing destination for many a despot without a despotism left to despotically rule.
Another sign that his time may be coming to an end is that, while political dissent is still handled with an iron fist, the country’s once-ubiquitous moral police have all but given up trying to enforce social restrictions on the populace, mostly out of a tacit admission that they lack the capacity to do so.
Furthermore, fresh off a successful operation that airlifted Nicolás Maduro out of Venezuela in less time than it would take you to watch a Darren Aronofsky flick, Trump is certainly feeling his oats when it comes to dispensing with flies in his geopolitical ointment. While nation-building isn’t his thing, getting the Ayatollah out of power and ensuring that the next government is cozy with neither Beijing nor Moscow would certainly be a great way to keep the start of 2026 going strong for Washington.
Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t. The point is that the one who shouldn’t be invoking the names of powerful leaders whose hubris got them toppled is the one currently planning a permanent vacation to Moscow if things in his country keep going the way they are. Just saying.
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