Panelists Norman Roule and Karim Sadjadpour discuss the raging anti-regime protests in Iran and on ‘Special Report.’

The difference between the illusion of power and its reality is the difference between Ayatollah Khamenei and President Donald Trump. Trump is on the cusp of joining the very small number of American presidents who reorder the world. Khamenei is on the cusp of history’s abyss reserved for murderous fanatics. If Trump tips Khamenei over that edge, the president’s place in history will be secure. He will have returned freedom to the great Persian people. 

The belief in the unlimited power of a totalitarian government to maintain itself and protect its rulers is a dangerous conceit, as Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Venezuela’s Nicholas Maduro have both discovered. It may be that Ayatollah Khamenei is in the process of discovering the same hard reality: No government, no matter how ruthless, can endure for centuries or even decades in the face of a resentful population. 

Not even the rulers of Rome at the height of the Caesars or the Severan dynasty were guaranteed an endless run of power. The Soviet Union, which possessed both nuclear weapons and an omnipresent security service, survived only from 1922 to 1991.  

IRAN FLIPS ‘KILL SWITCH’ TO HIDE ALLEGED CRIMES AS DEATH TOLL RISES AMID PROTESTS

The Assad family took power in 1971 when Hafez Al-Assad consolidated control in Syria and kept it until December 2024, when his son and other family members were obliged to flee to Russia.

"Papa Doc" Duvalier took power in Haiti in 1957 and held it to his death in 1971. He was succeeded by his son Jean-Claude Duvalier, nicknamed "Baby Doc," who was........

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