They were.
He told them to shelter indoors.
He said 'help is on the way'.
And then Trump got into a pissing contest over the Strait instead.
I think Trump assumed that Iranians would take over their own nation once its military was a smoking hole in the ground. Trump did the thing. The Iranians didn't.
I kept waiting for news, a clip, a photo, even a third-hand account of some manner of organized citizen overthrow of IRGC. It never came.
If Iranians expected American troops to be the only ones who would die taking over Iran, they were mistaken. Yes, I understand that many Iranians died protesting the regime. Protesting the regime and killing it are distinct activities.
I don't mean to bash Iranians, but this gives me the impression that the "80% of the population opposes the regime" number may be fiction.
I looked up where that number was from and found it was an anonymous online poll that did nothing to verify that respondents were actually in Iran. That poll claimed that more than 50% of Iranians are non-relgious. Every other estimate and data source puts the number of religious Iranians at 80%, which is much closer to what I'd imagine for that area of the world.
If opponents to the regime are not actually a vast majority, that would explain them not doing an uprising while the regime was off balance. Everything we've seen thus far fits that.
I'm not saying Iranians are lying. They may genuinely not know what their numbers are. Even in a country with free speech like the USA, people have immense difficulty personally estimating how many people hold a belief that they would hesitate to share publicly. How much more difficult would that be somewhere where you could actually be killed for sharing the same?