If President Donald Trump oversees the toppling of the ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, his achievements will rank with the greatest of those of any post-World War II president. That’s just an objective fact. If you don’t understand that fact, you haven’t been paying attention for more than 40 years.
So much of the commentary on the battle between the U.S. and Israel against Iran and its proxy terrorist groups has been filtered and refiltered through deeply biased “news outlets” that the public could be excused for losing sight of the main plot line.
That is, simply put: Iran is as evil a regime as exists on the planet and, given that it is run by religious fanatics with a peculiar theology rooted in end-times eschatology and “resistance” up to and especially including martyrdom, it is a uniquely dangerous regime. It cannot be allowed to have weapons of mass destruction or an arsenal of conventional weapons sufficient to deter normal regimes from stopping it from obtaining WMD, especially nuclear weapons.
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Every president since George W. Bush has explicitly stated that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons for the reasons stated above. Whether all the presidents since W meant what they said, they all said it. President Trump said it, too, but he alone had the will to order the American military, in concert with our Israeli ally and now our Gulf allies, to demolish the Iranian nuclear weapons program as well as the forest of missiles built by the mullahs to protect that nuclear weapons program.
In the days since protests against the regime erupted in late December, the fanatics atop Iran have proven to anyone with even an elementary grasp of world affairs that it is a uniquely malevolent regime. Not only did it proceed to begin to rebuild its nuclear weapons program after Operation Midnight Hammer, it accelerated its production of the missile array intended to deter a second such mission.
Not only did Ayatollah Khamenei not get the message from last June’s destructive strikes, he did exactly what an unbalanced fanatic would do: Double down on getting the nukes while at the same time racing to build a missile arsenal to deter a second Midnight Hammer attack. The old and now dead tyrant did exactly the opposite of what a rational ruler atop a rational regime would do after last year’s blows, and he did so while also ordering the murder of tens of thousands of his own citizens in January.
The regime also bared its fangs when, after the U.S. and Israeli began the latest effort to tame the rabid beast of a regime, it responded by firing ballistic missiles wildly at everyone and everything it could reach. With a schoolyard bully’s emotional intelligence, first Ayatollah Khamenei and then his successors — whoever they might be — ordered up actions guaranteeing an all-out effort to destroy the regime’s ability to procure nukes or missiles. It’s so self-destructive a behavior as to qualify as regime suicide. The U.S., Israel and the Gulf allies have thus set about “finishing the job,” which means, simply, permanently deterring the Iranian lust for nukes, missiles and terrorists.
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Iran has been pounded for a month now, and it may be another month or two before there is only rubble left to bounce there. Nevertheless, left-wing “journalists” especially insist on seeing this as just another opportunity to try and tear down Trump. The absurdist theater of another round of “No Kings” rallies this past weekend helped everyone watching delineate the world into two camps: the serious and informed versus the unserious, ill-informed or, to put it as simply as possible, dumb-as-dirt folks when it comes to rogue regimes which threaten the here and now, the near term and the long term future of the world.
Iran’s rulers proved themselves to be crazy and fixated on acquiring nuclear weapons. For the people who previously chose not to see the brutality of the regime, the regime helped all but the resolutely blinded to see how evil the regime is. The “Trump Derangement Syndrome”-afflicted people have seen their illness now manifest in the inability to distinguish between the purely evil and existential threat that Iran posed to the entire world from the actions of a popularly elected president who is as unlike an authoritarian as to surrender his favorite weapon for any regime not named Iran — tariffs — to the United Stated Supreme Court. “Kings” do not defer to the authority of an independent judiciary, but of course Trump has, again and again.
The result needed in the war has not yet been achieved. But if President Trump delivers it, only his critics incapable of basic objectivity will deny the significance of his order to take down the regime that has bedeviled the world for almost a half century.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6 p..m ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996, where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.
