President Trump called for "new leadership" in Iran as the regime's crackdown on protesters turns deadlier by the day. That may sound like tough talk, but it is far different when your phone and social media feeds are full of verified footage: body bags, morgues, and families searching rows of the dead.

America should say, clearly and unapologetically, that the Iranian people deserve a future without the Islamic Republic — and Tehran should stop assuming Trump only talks. When he plays "will he or won't he," he sometimes does. Iran knows this best; they got bombed after months of Trump talking about deals.

Iran's regime wants the world to treat this like an internal dispute. But a government that shoots protesters, throttles the internet, and threatens executions isn't a normal state; it's a hostage situation with a flag.

Even the regime's own numbers tell you this isn't "unrest." Reuters reported that an Iranian official put the death toll at at least 5,000, while human rights groups cited more than 24,000 arrests and warned Iran's judiciary was signaling possible executions under bogus charges.

This is the civil-liberties point in plain English: the regime doesn't just punish violence. It punishes speech, assembly, and even grief — then tries people through a system designed to confirm guilt rather than discover the truth.

The violence isn't a rumor. CBS reported that journalists reviewed morgue footage showing rows of body bags and visible injuries, including gunshot wounds, in what it described as credible, verified video circulating from Tehran. The people inside Iran have shared these videos and pictures with the world, at the cost of their own lives.

And human rights investigators have been careful about what they claim. Amnesty International reported that it verified video evidence and corroborated accounts from eyewitnesses and medical workers describing lethal force against protesters and bystanders.

Meanwhile, the regime's propaganda follows a script. Reuters reported that Iran's supreme leader blamed the U.S. and Israel for the unrest and vowed not to let "criminals" go unpunished.

That's the totalitarian move: if you protest, you're a traitor; if you die, foreigners did it; if someone reports it, they're an agent. The narrative serves the bullets.

And here's the second-order effect that should enrage every "stability" realist in the West. When foreign capitals treat mass murder as an internal matter, dictators learn the lesson: kill fast enough and the world will beg you for "order." That incentive structure produces more killings, not fewer.

This is also why the Persian-heritage point matters. Iran is not synonymous with the Islamic Republic; the regime is a temporary occupation of an ancient civilization.

Nowruz — the Persian New Year — long predates the modern theocracy and is part of Iran's pre-Islamic cultural inheritance, as Encyclopaedia Iranica notes. That continuity matters because it competes with ideological control.

Even under repression, people use culture as a form of resistance. Time reported that celebrating Nowruz in public can become an act of defiance in a system that tries to police ordinary life.

So when Trump says Iran needs new leadership, he's not insulting "Iran." He's drawing the necessary line between the Iranian people and the men who rule them through fear.

Of course, Tehran threatens retaliation. Reuters reported that Iran's president warned the U.S. of harsh retaliation if Washington intervenes militarily.

But Iran's leadership also wants to inflate its own leverage. Yes, the regime can still cause harm through missiles, proxies, cyberattacks, and terror. But it does not sit on equal footing with the United States in conventional military capability — and recent history has made that painfully obvious to America's adversaries.

Last year, the U.S. crossed the line from warning to action. Americans struck three Iranian nuclear sites — Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan — after Trump announced the operation publicly.

Then came an even clearer competence signal closer to home. U.S. Special Forces captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a military operation and flew them out of Venezuela.

Deterrence works only if threats stay credible and disciplined; empty bluster teaches adversaries to gamble. But credibility cuts both ways, too: once you show you'll act, the other side has to stop assuming you'll fold just because it says the word "war."

Regime-change rhetoric can indeed backfire, foreign involvement can taint local uprisings, and military pressure can spiral into a broader conflict that harms the very people you want to help.

That's a serious concern. But it's also what the Islamic Republic counts on — that fear of risk will become a veto on moral clarity, and that "stability" will become a euphemism for mass graves.

The smarter policy starts with precision and focus. Free the people. Unleash the internet with the help of Elon Musk and Starlink, and use the same lethal force we're using on cartels and terrorists. The time of the Islamic scourge in Iran is over.

At this point, that move has to be considered to prevent the regime from escalating into mass executions and wholesale slaughter. The notion that Trump "always chickens out" isn't supported by reality. Iran's nuclear sites are dead. Maduro is in New York.  The Mullahs should be six feet under.

The end state isn't an American puppet situation. It's an Iranian reset: a country that can reclaim its identity, stop murdering its own citizens to stay in power, and stop functioning as a permanent source of regional aggression.

Tehran wants to believe it can wait Trump out. It wants to believe the world will look away from the body bags and argue about nuance.

But the videos are already the argument, as CBS News reported. Persia is older than the ayatollahs — and the Iranian people deserve a government that's less interested in erasing them or their heritage.