25. Iranian author Majid Mohammadi posited three causes for the protests: government corruption, economic hardships, and religious authoritarianism. In his opinion, religious authoritarianism was the most salient target of the protests since protesters had come to believe that the Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist was determined to preserve the status-quo and not susceptible to reform. According to Trita Parsi, the founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, the main participants in these protests were different from those involved in the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests. Parsi suggested that the protesters were mainly those disillusioned with the Iranian reform movement or who never supported it. He said Iranian Reformists had been surprised by these protests and had not come out in support of the protestors. American journalist and political commentator Bret Stephens wrote that "real democracies don't live in fear of their own people", referring to the crackdown on protesters, and the Internet. He said that one of the reasons the protesters called for Khamenei to step down was frustration over his control of a financial organisation called "Setad" that was worth at least $95 billion in 2013 (according to a report from Reuters). According to Aljazeera, the leaders of Iran have pointed fingers at foreign media for overstating the extent of the protest. The New York Times columnist and commentator on Iranian politics Roger Cohen, argued that "Trump Is Right, This Time, About Iran", writing that even if Trump's support of protestors "sounds hollow", he is right to tweet that the "wealth of Iran is being looted" by a "brutal and corrupt Iranian regime". Whereas Philip Gordon, senior fellow in US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the same newspaper that the best thing the President could do to support Iranians was "Be quiet and do nothing", arguing that if "Mr Trump blows up the deal and reimposes sanctions, he will not be doing the opposition a favor but instead giving Iranians a reason to rally to—rather than work against—the government they might otherwise despise." Elliott Abrams, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for the Reagan administration, criticized The New York Times on 31 December for what he said was misleading coverage of Iran's protests. In his view, the news coverage diminished the value of Iran's protests, limiting it to the economic sphere, while the slogans suggested that the political dimension of the