United States (US) President Donald Trump has publicly backed the Iranian protests, portraying them as a national struggle against a regime he accuses of killing its own people.

On social media he said, “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA!!! [Make Iran Great Again] PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”

The scale of the killing remains contested, in large part because the regime has worked to obscure it. Iranian authorities have released no comprehensive official death toll. United Nations (UN) officials have said security forces have killed hundreds of peaceful protesters. Independent Iranian rights groups have reported figures ranging from the high hundreds into the low thousands, stressing that verification is ongoing and that internet access inside the country is severely restricted.

Tehran has repeatedly shut down or throttled internet access during periods of unrest. Monitoring groups such as NetBlocks have documented near total connectivity blackouts during the latest crackdown, a tactic designed to disrupt protest coordination and prevent video evidence of abuses from reaching the outside world.

The question now is what leverage Washington is prepared to use. The administration has already signalled an escalation in the severity of coercive economic actions against the regime, including broader penalties on countries and firms that continue doing business with Iran. Beyond sanctions, analysts are increasingly focused on Iran’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers, vessels used to move crude in defiance of international sanctions.

According to Warwick Grey, senior editor at The Common Sense, “America is unlikely to put boots on the ground in Iran. The more plausible path is to lean on cyber capabilities to disrupt the regime’s command-and-control networks, tighten Iran’s isolation from allies, and enablers through economic coercion, including Trump’s threat of an additional tariff on countries that keep trading with Tehran, and then hit the regime where it hurts the most, its oil cash flow. The single most important pillar of regime strength the US could target is a wide-scale maritime interdiction campaign in and around the Persian Gulf aimed at Iran’s shadow fleet tankers that keep its exports moving despite sanctions. The US is already applying a version of this approach in Venezuela by interdicting sanction-busting oil shipments.”

Grey continued, “This is not about regime change by force. It is about raising the cost of repression while signalling to ordinary Iranians that their struggle is seen. The regime’s bet is that violence, censorship, and time will exhaust the streets. Washington’s challenge is to apply pressure that weakens the state’s coercive capacity without tipping Iran into wider chaos. The outcome will hinge less on rhetoric than on whether Tehran’s cash flows and command structures finally start to crack.”