Picture a man on a Tehran rooftop on the night of January 8. He has a Starlink dish wrapped in a blanket, one of somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 terminals that activists believe were smuggled into Iran, and he knows that a law passed late last year can send him to prison for 10 years for owning it, or to the gallows if a judge decides to call it espionage. Below him, the streets are full. By the following night, according to Iranian health officials who spoke to Western media and hospital tallies compiled by the surgeon Amir Parasta, as many as 100,000 of his countrymen may be dead. The regime cut the internet before the shooting started, and it did so on purpose.
President Trump understood what that blackout meant. On January 11th, he said he would work with Elon Musk to get Iranians back online, and two days later SpaceX waived its fees inside Iran. Then came February 28th, the strikes, and a second blackout that ran 88 days, with connectivity falling to roughly 1% by early March. Since then Iran has been through a ceasefire, a memorandum signed on June 17, attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, and renewed hostilities on July 7. Most voters in Ohio or Arizona see strikes and a blockade. They see very little of the Iranian people, and in 27 days they vote.
Iranian American organizations have drafted four measures that would change that picture, and each one passes a single demanding test. The President can direct it now, under authority he already holds, without waiting on Congress, new appropriations, foreign capitals, or corporate goodwill. Congress, which voted in both chambers in June to direct a withdrawal from the conflict, is in no mood to help. The measures are modest on paper. I suspect they would matter more to ordinary Iranians than anything else Mr. Trump could do between now and Election Day.
An old puzzle concerns the sculptor’s studio. When she finishes her work and holds it aloft, is there one object in her hands or two, a statue and a lump of clay sharing the same place? Philosophers still argue about statues. Iran poses the political version of the puzzle, and there the answer is easy. The Islamic Republic and the Iranian nation occupy the same territory, yet they are two things with opposed interests, and the regime’s survival strategy depends on persuading Washington to treat them as one. A bomb cannot tell them apart. A license, a forfeiture order, or a sanctions designation can.
The first measure keeps Iranians connected before the next blackout. In 2022, Treasury issued General License D-2, which opened the door to communications tools for Iranians, but providers still lack clear permission for Direct-to-Cell satellite service, eSIM provisioning, mesh networks, and, most awkwardly, the payment arrangements that let a company get paid for serving Iranian civilians. An expanded license from Treasury’s sanctions office, published within 30 days with plain-language guidance, would close those gaps, and Commerce already accepts an OFAC authorization as satisfying its own export rules. The State Department can commit its existing internet freedom money to circumvention tools, and the National Security Council can adopt a standing plan that activates the day the next shutdown begins, not on the third day.
Treasury hawks will object that any new authorization looks like sanctions relief amid maximum pressure. On this point they are mistaken. The license would cover civilian communications only, exclude the regime and its security services, grant nothing on oil, banking, or proliferation, and screen providers without collecting a single Iranian user’s identity. The regime’s countermeasures are the harder problem. Tehran jams satellite signals with equipment reportedly sourced from Russia and China, and it has flown drones over neighborhoods to spot dishes on rooftops. Direct-to-Cell service counters the drone, since a phone in a coat pocket looks like any other phone, while State-funded VPNs and mesh tools give users a second path on nights when the jammers win.
The second measure will provoke the loudest argument. When the United States is engaged in armed hostilities, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act lets the President confiscate property belonging to the foreign country fighting us and vest it as he directs. Mr. Trump formally notified Congress in July that hostilities with the Islamic Republic had resumed. George W. Bush used the same power in Executive Order 13290 on March 20, 2003, vesting roughly $1.7 billion in frozen Iraqi funds in Treasury to help the Iraqi people. Reporting this spring put the regime’s directly frozen holdings in the US at about $2 billion. A new order would steer that money toward internet access, digital security, humanitarian aid through trusted partners, and documenting the regime’s crimes, at no cost to the American taxpayer.
Americans holding terrorism judgments against Iran have competing claims, and Bush handled the same problem in 2003 by excepting funds already subject to writs, language the new order can borrow intact. The diplomatic objection is weaker than it sounds. Tehran’s negotiators in New York have demanded the release of $24 billion in frozen assets while Washington insists on maritime and nuclear steps first, and Republicans spent much of 2023 attacking the Biden administration for moving $6 billion to Qatar. Vesting the American share takes a ransom off the table. Reza Pahlavi made a version of this case at the Concordia Summit last month, proposing that Iran’s frozen wealth fund the people resisting the regime so American taxpayers aren’t asked to, since Iranians are prepared to do the work on the ground.
The third measure would name the killers. The MAHSA Act, signed in April 2024, required the executive branch to determine by July 23 of that year whether to sanction the Supreme Leader, the President of Iran, and their networks. Those determinations were never made public. In September 2024, Senators Jim Risch and Marco Rubio, joined by Representatives Jim Banks and Mike Lawler, wrote to President Biden that enforcement was long overdue. Rubio now runs the State Department, so he can carry out the demand he signed. Treasury and State should complete the determinations and designate the IRGC, Basij, and Law Enforcement Command units, commanders, and judges responsible for January 8 and 9, along with the officials behind the executions that followed. Iran Human Rights counted at least 532 executions in the first eight months of this year, 29 of them tied to the January protests.
Designations must meet legal standards, and evidence smuggled out of a blacked-out country is hard to authenticate. The second half of the measure addresses that problem with a secure channel, run by State and Justice, to receive and preserve videos, documents, and testimony with a proper chain of custody. Badly handled evidence can get a witness killed, so the channel has to protect identities from the first upload. The payoff reaches well past the senior commanders. Activists inside Iran say the people they fear most are the operational ranks who staff checkpoints and pull triggers, and a 22-year-old Basiji who sees his own commander’s name on a Treasury list may start doing different arithmetic.
The fourth measure protects the people who rely on all this connectivity, because a phone can be a lifeline and a tracking device in the same hand. Regime-linked hackers have spent years phishing activists, planting malicious apps, and hijacking accounts, and VPNs tied to the regime circulate widely inside Iran. State can make Iran a priority within its existing digital security programs. The FBI and CISA can warn Iranians publicly which apps report back to the IRGC, and Treasury can sanction the companies that build the regime’s censorship and surveillance machinery under executive orders already on the books. The intelligence agencies will worry about sources and methods, as they should, which is why the warnings go out only where the evidence can be published without burning anyone.
Cynics will call the timing a campaign stunt. I see it differently. Ludovic Hood of the Hudson Institute argued in August that the regime is despised by its own people and that Washington should expand support for activists inside Iran, and he was writing about the regime’s fragility rather than the midterms, the plain fact is that a President who signs these orders this week will have the first results in hand right around November 3, with a license published and an inventory of regime assets finished and the first names on the sanctions list and a public warning out about the apps the regime uses to hunt its own citizens, and voters will be able to see that the war has a purpose beyond the next airstrike. That is a perfectly legitimate thing for a goverment to show the people about to judge it.
One more reason to move before November has less to do with elections than with deals. Steve Witkoff has been trading messages with Abbas Araghchi in New York, and an agreement may come, possibly a good one. Yet the June memorandum did not survive July, and every negotiation invites pressure to trade away whatever is still pending. Money that has already paid for satellite access cannot be handed back as a sweetener. A commander already named for the January killings stays named, and evidence already preserved stays preserved, whatever the diplomats sign. Of everything the President can do in Iran, these are the steps a bad deal would struggle to reverse, and that may be the best argument for taking them while the choice is still his alone.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly. Each op-ed edited for grammar and clarity using Ai in partnership with Grammarly. Data provided in a sponsored partnership with Polymarket.
Good advice. Think Trump will see it? Take it?
Supporting the Iranian people with the tools to speak, organize, and expose the officials who terrorize them is not controversial. Censorship protects power by isolating victims and concealing evidence; breaking that isolation strikes at an authoritarian government’s ability to control the story. Trump should pursue lawful asset transfers, protect witnesses, and demand evidence strong enough to identify individual perpetrators. That would put American pressure where it belongs while helping civilians retain control over their own future. The election calendar adds urgency, but the case stands on its merits. A durable victory would leave Tehran’s rulers less able to silence their people and less confident that their crimes will disappear.