There is a particular brand of naivety that only the truly desperate or the terminally optimistic possess—the belief that a New York real estate developer-turned-demagogue would actually trade a single golf outing for the preservation of human rights in a country he couldn't find on a map without a labeled coloring book. We are, of course, discussing the current collective epiphany occurring among Iranian dissidents who, in a fit of tragic delusion, actually believed Donald Trump’s digital bravado. The former President, a man whose relationship with the truth is best described as 'restraining order adjacent,' promised the world that the United States would intervene if the Iranian government started liquidating its own citizens. Spoiler alert: the government started liquidating its own citizens, and the only thing the U.S. sent was a few more kilobytes of performative outrage.

Let us dissect the anatomy of this betrayal, though calling it a betrayal implies a prior existence of loyalty, which is a laughable concept in the realm of high-stakes narcissism. For years, the American Right has prided itself on a 'tough on Tehran' posture that consists mostly of elderly men in suits making 'grrr' noises while cashing checks from defense contractors. They cheered when Trump tore up the nuclear deal, not because they had a better plan, but because it felt like a schoolyard shove. When the Iranian streets filled with people demanding basic dignity, Trump did what he does best: he tweeted. He offered the 'full support' of the United States. He warned the mullahs that the world was watching. And while the world did indeed watch—mostly through the flickering blue light of smartphones while eating overpriced salads—the promised 'rescue' remained as mythical as a balanced budget or a coherent sentence from the current occupant of the White House.

On the other side of the aisle, we have the Left, whose hypocrisy is so dense it has its own gravitational pull. These are the same people who spent four years screaming that Trump was a fascist, yet they are now strangely silent about his failure to act, because acting would mean 'imperialism.' Their solution to the slaughter in Tehran is a series of curated hashtags and a vigorous debate over whether 'freedom' is a Western construct used to oppress the Global South. Both sides of the American political apparatus are fundamentally united by a single, shimmering truth: they do not care. To the Right, the Iranian protesters were useful props for a campaign ad about 'strength.' To the Left, they are an inconvenient complication to a narrative about the evils of Western intervention. Both views are equally nauseating and equally useless to the people currently being hung from cranes in Eshad Square.

To be fair to the Iranians, they aren't the first to fall for the 'American Rescue' grift. The Kurds have a loyalty punch card for it at this point. The Vietnamese have the T-shirt. The Afghans have the memories of falling off C-17s. The United States is that friend who promises to help you move, but then stops answering their phone the moment you actually pick up a box. We provide the rhetoric, we provide the 'moral support,' and occasionally we provide the munitions that both sides use to kill each other, but we never, ever provide the actual salvation we sell like a late-night infomercial product. Trump didn't 'betray' the protesters; he simply followed the standard operating procedure of the American Empire: talk loudly, carry a big stick, and then use that stick to beat your chest for domestic ratings while the rest of the world burns.

The tragedy here isn't just that thousands are dead. The tragedy is the persistent, idiotic hope that a superpower acts on anything other than cold, reptilian self-interest. The Iranian people expected a savior and got a brand. They expected a shield and got a press release. While the mullahs consolidate their power with the efficiency of a medieval meat grinder, Washington is already bored. The news cycle has moved on to more pressing matters, like the price of eggs or whatever idiotic thing a congresswoman from Georgia said today. The dead protesters are no longer 'freedom fighters'; they are yesterday’s data points, discarded like a used wrapper in the gutter of history. It is a masterclass in geopolitical ghosting, and the bill—as always—is paid in blood by people who were foolish enough to believe that a tweet from a golden tower was a binding contract.