Jun 3, 2026

An Open Letter from the Iranian People and Their Diaspora

Dear President Trump

One of the most repeated complaints we heard from you — a refrain heard across press conferences, rallies, and late-night posts on Truth Social — has been the lament: "They don't respect us." It is a phrase that speaks to something deep in your heart as an American and President of the United States: a fierce, almost primal demand that the American people and the office of the American Presidency, and the man who holds it, be accorded the dignity both deserve. And so, Mr. President, allow me to remind you of something. Allow me the liberty to hold up a mirror. When young, courageous Iranians risked their lives and Named Streets After You, in the extraordinary days following the American military strikes on the murderous Islamic Republic's terror apparatus in February 2026 — when the United States Navy filled the Persian Gulf with its mighty presence, when the skies above Tehran shook with the thunder of justice, when the top brass of the IRGC thugs and murderers were systematically eliminated through Israel's surgical precision — something remarkable happened on the streets of Iran and the free world. One and a half million educated, pro-Liberal Democracy Iranians in the diaspora, representing no fewer than thirty million of their compatriots trapped behind the bars of the Islamic Republic terror machine, took to the streets in what can only be described as a historic eruption of hope. In ten of the greatest cities of the free world — from Los Angeles to London, from Toronto to Berlin, from Stockholm to Washington D.C. — young Iranian men and women marched with tears streaming down their faces and joy blazing in their hearts. They did not chant the name of any revolutionary figure. They chanted your name, Mr. President. "We love President Trump!" They promised to name streets and squares after you once we all return home. They proudly and joyfully carried the American flag and your image. They painted banners. They celebrated you not as a politician, not as an American, but as a hero and a liberator — as the man who had finally, after forty-six years of unimaginable suffering, said enough to the terrorist regime that had stolen our country, murdered our children, and murdered many Americans, and exported its terror across the globe. And this writer — a Dubai based, property developer by profession and by passion — published the architectural rendering of a one-hundred-story twin tower and made a public promise before God and history: I will develop Trump Tower Tehran. It was not a marketing stunt. It was a declaration of faith that a free Iran was finally within reach, and that the man in the White House, Donald J. Trump, was the catalyst of that freedom.

That, Mr. President, is the definition of respect. That is the kind of respect no amount of diplomatic protocol or foreign flattery by sycophants can manufacture. It came from the broken hearts and desperate souls of a people who had waited half a century for someone to stand with them.

"Help Is on the Way" — That Promise Now Bleeds:

You said it, Mr. President. Or your administration said it loudly enough that forty million Iranians heard it as a promise from you personally: Help is on the way. We believed you. But the help did not come. Not in the form that mattered most. As the Iranian people stood at the threshold of history — as twenty million young, liberal, democratic-minded Iranians dared to believe and risked their lives, that the moment of their liberation had finally arrived — the apparatus of the terrorist Islamist Regime, battered but not broken, regrouped. Mojtaba Khamenei, the very man you may now be considering meeting, unleashed his IRGC death squads with a ferocity that staggers the conscience of civilization.

The butcher's ledger reads as follows:

42,000 innocent protesters massacred by military grade heavy machine guns — men, women, and children — in the crackdown that followed the brief window of hope your strikes had opened. 50,000 more languish today in the dungeons of the Islamist terrorist Regime, in conditions so medieval, so deliberately cruel, so designed to maximize suffering and terror, that history will one day struggle to describe them in language that does justice to their horror. And the executions continue. Every day, after trials that would shame a kangaroo, Iranians are marched to the gallows. The Islamist Regime of terror has now set a new record: 687 executions and counting as of the date of this writing — a number that rivals the darkest chapters of twentieth-century totalitarianism, achieved not in decades but in months. This is the government, Mr. President. This is the regime. This is the man — Mojtaba Khamenei, the butcher of Tehran — with whom your negotiators are now reportedly drafting a sixty-day memorandum of understanding!!!

The 180-Degree Turn That Breaks Our Hearts.

History will record the striking symmetry of what has transpired. The same President Trump who: Deployed the full force of the United States Navy to the Persian Gulf; Coordinated with Israel to eliminate the entire senior leadership of the IRGC thugs; Watched as the father of Mojtaba Khamenei — the Supreme terrorist himself — killed in the opening hours of the conflict; Effectively told the people of Iran: "Rise up. Take control of your government institutions. Help is on the way." ... is now the same President Trump who appears willing to legitimize Mojtaba Khamenei as a negotiating partner, to offer a ceasefire that halts the momentum of Iranian popular resistance, and to seek a nuclear deal with the surviving remnants of a regime whose hands are soaked in the blood of its own people. We ask, with all the force of our broken but undefeated hearts: What happened? Was it the Strait of Hormuz and the pressure of oil markets? Was it the advice of diplomats more comfortable with stability than with justice? Was it the conniving Chinese or Russian tyrants? Was it the seductive simplicity of a "deal" — the kind of transaction that looks good on paper and photographs well at a signing ceremony — regardless of what it costs the people who have no seat at the table? We do not know the full answer Mr. President. But we know this: we, the people of Iran are watching. And forty million of them are asking the same question you have so often asked of others — "Where is the respect?"

The Ghost of Jimmy Carter

Mr. President, you have spent much of your political career defining yourself in opposition to weakness, to appeasement, to the kind of feckless foreign policy that signals to the world's tyrants that they can act with impunity. You have held no one in greater contempt than those American leaders who made America look small and disrespected. We, the Iranian people, have our own memory of such a leader. His name was Jimmy Carter. In 1979, as the fake, deep state orchestrated revolutionary tide rose against our beloved King — Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a monarch who was imperfect as all leaders are imperfect, but who was leading Iran toward modernization, toward education, toward a place among the community of free nations — President Carter betrayed him. He withdrew American support at the critical moment. He allowed the forces of Khomeini terrorism to fill the vacuum. He opened the door through which forty-six years of darkness walked into our country. To this day, the name of Jimmy Carter is spoken among Iranians with a bitterness that transcends politics. He did not merely make a diplomatic error. He stabbed a rapidly growing nation in the back. He handed twenty million women the black shroud of the hijab. He handed a generation of young Iranians the noose, the firing squad, and the torture chamber. If you, Mr. President — you, who were named on street banners and cheered in the plazas of free cities by people who never cheer anyone — if you now extend a lifeline to the murderous regime that massacred 42,000 of our children just in two days, you will not merely lose their respect. You will join Jimmy Carter in the hall of those who, at the moment history demanded greatness, chose a “deal” instead. The disrespect that will follow — from a people who loved you as they have loved few foreign leaders in their history — will be immeasurably worse than anything the Islamist Regime's proxies could ever manufacture. It will be the disrespect of the genuinely betrayed.

Our Position: Immovable, Unconditional, Non-Negotiable

And so, finally, let this letter serve as notice — clear, unambiguous, and permanent — to President Trump, to his administration, to the negotiators in Muscat and Geneva and wherever else these conversations are taking place, and to Mojtaba Khamenei himself, hunched over his courier notes in whatever bunker-mousehole he now inhabits:

We, the people of Iran, have not moved an inch.

Your rapprochement with the terrorist, murderous regime changes nothing for us. Your memorandum of understanding binds us to nothing. Your sixty-day ceasefire is your business, not ours. We represent twenty million organized members and tens of millions of sympathizers of the Liberal Democratic Party of Iran, and we speak for the soul of a nation. Our demand is singular, total, and absolute: The complete and unconditional end of the Islamist terrorist Regime of Iran. Not a reformed Islamic Republic. Not a moderated Islamic Republic. Not an Islamic Republic with a better nuclear deal and slightly fewer executions. The end of it — root and branch, institution and ideology, from the Supreme Leader's office to the last IRGC checkpoint. And in its place: the restoration of Iran's legitimate constitutional order — the Constitution of 1906, the oldest and most proudly democratic constitution in the history of the Middle East, which was never legitimately superseded. The Islamic Republic was not a revolution. It was a fraud — a theft of a people's future, conducted at gunpoint, ratified by terror, and sustained for forty-six years by the blood of the innocent. It was, from its very first day, legally void. That constitution stands. It has always stood. And on the day Iran is free, it will stand again as the foundation upon which a new, democratic, pluralistic, and outward-looking Iranian government will be built — a government that will, we promise, be the most reliable partner the United States and the free world have ever had in the Middle East.

A Final Word to President Trump

Mr. President, you still have a choice. The greatest leaders in history are not those who never wavered. They are those who, when they recognized a wrong turn, had the courage to correct it. It is not too late to remember what you were to the Iranian people in those extraordinary days of February 2026 — not a foreign president, but a symbol of hope. The forty million who chanted your name are still there. The twenty million young Iranians who dream of a free, liberal democratic, secular Iran are still there. The fifty thousand political prisoners are still there, waiting. Do not trade their freedom for a sixty-day ceasefire and a photo opportunity with a butcher who communicates by courier from a mousehole bunker. The streets of Tehran are waiting to be named after you — permanently, in marble, in a free country. But only if you earn it.