Sen. Ron Johnson suggested Sunday that the problem with President Trump’s Iran war is that the people of Iran lack guns to overthrow their government.
The Wisconsin senator appeared on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, and said he was “not surprised at all” by the administration’s inability to cut a deal with the Iranian regime.
“The ayatollahs, even though they’ve been you know, so degraded in terms of their capabilities, nobody thought this would be easy. They’ve been preparing for this for 47 years,” the Trump ally told host Martha Raddatz.
“They have multiple layers. They’ve got 200,000 people in the IRGC, 600,000 people in the Basij police force. They are brutal.”
Johnson, 71, then suggested that in an ideal world, Iranian citizens would be armed to fight against the ayatollahs and achieve what Trump and JD Vance couldn’t.
“By the way, this is exactly what nationwide gun control results in,” he noted. “The Iranian people are completely disarmed. It’s going to be very difficult for them to rise up. And so it’s a very difficult situation now.”
While Johnson was happy to suggest that Iranians should be armed and fighting against their leaders, earlier in the conversation he made it clear that they were just collateral damage in the war.
Clarifying that “ayatollahs” had “blood on their hands of American soldiers,” Johnson added: “It’s the regime that declared war on America, not the Iranian people. So we’re not at war with the Iranian people. We’re trying to end the state sponsor of terrorism.”
Despite Johnson and many other GOP members describing the Iranian people as simply caught in the crossfire for the greater good, it doesn’t mean they’ve gone untouched by Trump’s war.
Earlier this week, the civilian death toll of Iranians reached an estimated 1,700, including over 250 children. Meanwhile, the number of U.S. dead and wounded soldiers continues to rise.
Last week, Trump suggested that he was willing to wipe Iran off the map completely if leaders didn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” he wrote on Truth Social Tuesday morning, prior to his failed peace talks.
