The widening demonstrations over Iran’s ailing economy entered their sixth day on Jan. 2, spreading into the country’s rural provinces, with U.S. President Donald Trump and senior Iranian officials trading barbs over the unrest.
Trump initially wrote on his Truth Social platform, warning Iran that if it “violently kills peaceful protesters,” the United States “will come to their rescue.”
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump wrote, without elaborating.
At least seven people have been killed so far in violence surrounding the demonstrations, sparked in part by the collapse of Iran's rial currency.
The national currency, the rial, has lost more than a third of its value against the U.S. dollar over the past year, while double-digit hyperinflation has been undermining Iranians' purchasing power for years.
The inflation rate in December 2025 was 52 percent year-on-year, according to the Statistical Center of Iran, an official body.
Shortly after, Ali Larijani, a former parliament speaker who serves as the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, alleged on X that Israel and the U.S. were stoking the demonstrations.
“Trump should know that intervention by the U.S. in the domestic problem corresponds to chaos in the entire region and the destruction of the U.S. interests,” Larijani wrote on X, which the Iranian government blocks.
“The people of the U.S. should know that Trump began the adventurism. They should take care of their own soldiers.”
Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who previously was the council's secretary for years, warned that “any interventionist hand that gets too close to the security of Iran will be cut.”
“The people of Iran properly know the experience of ‘being rescued’ by Americans: From Iraq and Afghanistan to Gaza,” he added on X.
The current protests, now in their sixth day, have become the biggest in Iran since 2022, when the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody triggered nationwide demonstrations.
Iran’s government under reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has been trying to signal it wants to negotiate with protesters. However, Pezeshkian has acknowledged there is not much he can do as Iran’s rial has rapidly depreciated, with $1 now costing some 1.4 million rials.
Earlier this week, a video showing a person sitting in the middle of a Tehran street facing down motorcycle police went viral on social media, with some seeing it as a "Tiananmen moment,” a reference to a famous image of a Chinese protester defying a column of tanks during 1989 anti-government protests in Beijing.
On Jan. 1, state television alleged the footage had been staged to "create a symbol" and aired another video purportedly shot from another angle by a police officer's camera.
The protests, taking root in economic issues, have heard demonstrators chant against Iran’s regime as well. Israel also continued signaling support to a possible regime change.
A social media account linked to Israel’s Foreign Ministry appeared to the demonstrations in Iran, with a minister expressing hope that the unrest could herald the fall of the country’s regime.
One post on the Ministry’s Farsi-language account featured a cartoon of a lion and sun — an emblem that appeared on Iran’s flag until the 1979 Islamic Revolution — with the lion’s paw resting on an hourglass. The bottom of the hourglass bears the emblem from Iran’s current flag.
“The rise of Iranian lions and lionesses to fight against darkness,” the post read in Farsi. “Light triumphs over darkness.”
