Cruz to Trump: Arm Iran’s Protesters and End the Regime

Written By TNT Staff, Posted on October 30, 2026

Featured photo: Sen. Ted Cruz’s official portrait. U.S. Senate, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sen. Ted Cruz spent Wednesday with President Trump, and he used the time to make a case he has been making all year: arm the Iranian people and let them finish the regime themselves.

“[Trump] wants the threat posed by the Iranian regime resolved,” Cruz wrote on X afterward, as quoted by Iran International. “I have urged arming the Iranian protesters to overthrow the regime.”

Not boots, guns

This is not a new position. Cruz first pushed to arm protesters in late January, after the regime crushed the country’s largest wave of demonstrations in years, killing at least 12,000 people, sources told CBS News. In August he told the “School of War” podcast that “our objective should be regime collapse,” and spelled out the logic: “give them the guns, to let them overthrow their own government so that it’s not American boots on the ground, it’s Iranians fighting for their own country.” He also called the June U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, which later collapsed, a “terrible deal.”

It is a plan conservatives of both the hawkish and the restraint camps should be able to live with. No occupation, no nation-building, no American conscripts. Iranians who have been shot in the street for wanting a normal country would get the means to defend themselves.

Eight months, and still waiting

The war that began in February is now in its eighth month, and Washington is still running two tracks at once. Qatari mediators delivered a letter from Vice President JD Vance to Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, on Sunday, Al-Monitor reported. Tehran’s answer, through an informed source quoted by Iranian media, was that it would take no new step until the U.S. meets seven conditions “all at once,” including lifting the naval blockade and releasing frozen assets, according to a summary of the reports. Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said “the carrot-and-stick policy has no effect on Iran.” Qatari mediators were nonetheless back in Tehran on Friday, Arab News reported, citing an official briefed on the talks.

Meanwhile Israel has reportedly asked Washington for permission to strike Iranian energy facilities that have not yet been hit, if the campaign resumes, according to Israel’s public broadcaster Kan. The U.S. asked Israel in March to hold off on energy targets because of oil markets. Iran has threatened Gulf energy sites in return.

President Trump has been right on the big call: Iran cannot have a bomb, and the regime that chants “Death to America” is not a normal negotiating partner. But eight months of strikes, pauses, letters and memorandums have given Tehran time. Israel, the one ally fighting alongside us, should not have to wait on a decision that will come eventually anyway. And the Iranian people, who have paid the highest price, deserve more than speeches.

Cruz said he does not “particularly care who comes next” in Iran, so long as it is not “an Islamist who hates America.” That is a sensible standard. The fastest way to reach it runs through Iranians, not American troops. After the midterms, the president should give Israel its answer and give the protesters the means to win.

TNT Staff