US President Donald Trump's repeated public questioning of when the Iranian people will «rise up and fight» against their government reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of sentiment inside Iran, according to a social researcher based in Tehran. Writing from the Iranian capital, Hossein Hamdieh argues that if encouraging a popular revolt is indeed American policy, it is failing badly, at least for now.
Hamdieh, who holds a joint PhD in Geography and Anthropology from Humboldt University of Berlin and King's College London, cautions that his assessment is an observation drawn from conversations with many Iranians rather than a scientific poll. There is no reliable nationwide polling that can capture real-time Iranian opinion on the war, he notes. But the picture that emerges from those discussions, he says, is one of a population closing ranks against external attack rather than turning on its own leadership.
The researcher's account suggests that the conflict is having the opposite effect to the one Washington appears to anticipate. Instead of deepening existing divisions, the war is uniting a country that was already fractured along political, social and economic lines. The shared experience of foreign military pressure, he argues, is overriding domestic grievances and pushing Iranians to defend their nation against what they see as outside aggression.
Trump's statements on the matter have been characteristically erratic. In one recent post on his Truth Social platform, the US president asked when the Iranian people would rise up and fight. Hamdieh observes that the president's pronouncements are so frenetic and all over the place that it is difficult to distinguish which represent actual policy and which are simply noise. That ambiguity, he suggests, makes it even harder to assess whether the expectation of an uprising is a formal strategy or an offhand remark.
Either way, the gap between Washington's assumptions and conditions on the ground in Iran appears wide. The researcher's testimony points to a disconnect between American decision-making and the realities of Iranian society, where the experience of war is reshaping public attitudes in ways that external observers may not fully grasp. For now, the anticipated popular revolt against the government has not materialised, and the researcher's account indicates that the war itself is a central reason why.
The observations come amid heightened tensions between Iran and the United States, with Iran's Revolutionary Guard warning that it would «change the geography» of the conflict if Trump launches new strikes. That warning underscores the volatile security environment in which any calculation about Iranian public opinion must be made. It also highlights the risks of a strategy that depends on an internal uprising that, according to this account from Tehran, shows little sign of emerging.
Hamdieh's analysis does not claim to speak for all Iranians, and he is explicit that his conclusions are based on personal observation rather than comprehensive data. But his position inside the country gives his account a perspective that is often missing from external debates. While Washington appears to be waiting for a popular movement to materialise, the evidence he describes suggests that the war is consolidating support behind the government rather than eroding it.
For policymakers and analysts attempting to gauge the trajectory of the conflict, the implication is that assumptions about Iranian public sentiment may need revisiting. If the war is indeed uniting a divided country against foreign invaders, as the researcher argues, then strategies built on the expectation of an internal collapse could prove counterproductive. The coming weeks and months will test whether that dynamic holds, but for now the uprising that Trump has publicly hoped for remains absent from the streets of Tehran.