Welcome to a citations needed news brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

I'm Madam Johnson.

We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes of citations needed.

Now in its ninth season, we will be back with more full-length episodes of citations needed very, very shortly.

But in the meantime,

we are doing this news brief because, you know what, Adam, Donald Trump, if we are to believe

media reports, really, really cares about the rights and lives of Iranian protesters.

You might not assume that, but our media is telling us this is true.

So we wanted to talk about Trump the humanitarian

and how the media kind of takes at face value these absurd motivations

for what the Trump administration might be doing when it comes to Iran

in the wake of, of course, what we have seen

an ICE agent's murder of a mother in Minnesota, in the wake of doing a full-on regime change

in Venezuela. But you know what? Trump really now just cares about free speech and the rights of protesters when it comes to

Iran. Yeah, so there's a kind of maxim or I suppose a law of American or Western reportage,

which is that motivations for official enemy states, whether it's Russia, China, Iran,

whatever, are maximally cynical and

maximally non-ideological. They're sort of all about brute force and power and power projection.

Motors for the U.S., however, as we've detailed on this show for many years now, are always

assumed to be, unless otherwise explicitly stated, assumed to be benevolent, hand-wringing, humanitarian

in nature.

Which is when things might go, quote, unquote, wrong, you get the inevitable kind of, oh, we've,

...