Four days after they buried Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, mourners were still carrying banners that read "Kill Trump." Meanwhile, in at least 185 cities across all 31 Iranian provinces, ordinary Iranians were carrying a very different message — one that translates, roughly, to "we're done."
The banners didn't mention Trump. They called for the end of the Islamic Republic itself.
The protests that erupted on December 28, 2025 started the way these things always start in Iran — over money. The rial had collapsed more than 40% over the course of 2025. The official-to-market exchange rate gap hit 35-to-1. Grocery prices made the regime's $7-a-month food stipend look like a sick joke, which it was. But what began as economic rage has become something the mullahs can't buy off or shoot away. Demonstrators in dozens of universities, market strikes across more than a dozen cities, and open demands for regime change — not reform, not new elections, but the wholesale removal of theocratic rule.
The situation has only intensified since Khamenei's death on February 28 during Israeli and American airstrikes. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was installed as the new Supreme Leader and immediately inherited a country that doesn't want him. President Masoud Pezeshkian, age 71, tried the soft touch. He "tasked the Minister of the Interior to hear the legitimate demands" of the protesters, which is the diplomatic equivalent of asking the fire department to listen to the fire's concerns. He also acknowledged his own powerlessness on sanctions relief, which tells you everything about who actually runs Iran.
The regime's response to the protests has been exactly what you'd expect. On January 8, they shut down the internet — connectivity dropped to roughly 1% of normal levels. They jammed Starlink signals. They arrested thousands. Britain's Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper estimated that over 2,000 people had been killed, adding that "my fear is that the number may prove to be significantly higher." CBS sources put the number between 12,000 and 20,000. Verified morgue footage documented at least 366 bodies.
Twelve thousand to twenty thousand people. For wanting to choose their own government.
Exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi captured the shift in a statement that would've been unthinkable two years ago: "Our goal is no longer just to take to the streets. The goal is to prepare to seize and hold city centers." That's not protest language. That's revolution language. IranWire editor Maziar Bahari put it more simply: "This protest will be very, very difficult to contain."
President Trump, for his part, said what American presidents used to say before we started shipping pallets of cash to the mullahs: "Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before." The U.S. struck approximately 90 Iranian targets and facilitated over 800 commercial vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz since early May, moving 380 million barrels of crude oil through the corridor while the IRGC tried to choke it off. Iran's top negotiator, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, insisted that "the Strait of Hormuz will be reopened only under Iranian arrangements" — a bold claim from a government that can't keep the lights on in Tehran.
Michael Doran, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, wrote what the networks won't say out loud: "No matter what happens now, there is no scenario in which the Islamic Republic survives 2026 with its power intact." He outlined three possible futures — complete regime collapse, a Revolutionary Guard strongman takeover, or a weakened version of the current system limping forward through pure repression. None of them include the mullahs coming out stronger.
The IRGC issued a statement — "If you strike, you will be struck back" — which sounds tough until you remember three of their members were killed in the latest round of U.S. strikes and their Supreme Leader is a wounded heir that half the country wants removed. Supporters of the People's Mojahedin Organization have maintained a sit-in protest outside the Iranian embassy in Berlin for 128 consecutive days. Students are protesting university admissions across 20 provinces. The funeral procession in Mashhad was supposed to project unity. Instead it projected desperation.
The last time Iranians rose up like this — in 2022, after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini — the world posted hashtags and moved on. The Obama administration's approach to the 2009 Green Movement was to look the other way so they could preserve the nuclear deal. We sent them $150 billion and pretended it wouldn't fund the very security forces now shooting protesters in the streets.
This time there's no nuclear deal to protect. There's no Supreme Leader projecting invincibility. There's a wounded successor nobody chose, an economy in freefall, and a population that stopped asking for reform and started demanding replacement.
The 35-to-1 exchange rate tells you everything about the Islamic Republic's future. It's the same ratio as the regime's promises to its people — wildly inflated and worth nothing on the open market.
