The authorities are responding to protests with a ferocious security crackdown and near total internet shutdown.
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They're now countering on an unprecedented scale - a ferocious security crackdown and near total internet shutdown has been unleashed on a scale unseen in previous crises.
Some of the streets once engulfed by a roar of anger against the regime are now starting to go silent.
"On Friday it was extremely crowded - the crowd was unbelievable - and there was a lot of shooting. Then Saturday night it became much, much quieter," a resident of Tehran told BBC Persian.
"You would have to have a death wish to go out now," one Iranian journalist reflected.
This time, an internal upheaval is also compounded by an external threat, with President Trump's repeated warnings of military action coming seven months after the US carried out strikes on key nuclear facilities during a 12-day war between Iran and Israel, which left the regime weakened.
But, to use an analogy often used by the American leader, that has also given Iran "another card" to play.
Trump now says Tehran has called to go back to the negotiating table.
But Iran doesn't have a good hand: President Trump says he may still have to take some kind of action before any meeting; talks won't take all the searing heat out of this unrest.
And Iran won't capitulate to what have been the US's maximalist demands, including zero nuclear enrichment, which would cross red lines which lie at the very heart of this theocracy's strategic doctrine.
Whatever the pressure of this moment, there's no sign Iran's leaders are changing course.
Mortuary videos shows violent government crackdown in Iran"Their inclination is to clamp down, to try to survive this moment, and then to figure out where they go from here," says Vali Nasr from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, author of the book Iran's Grand Strategy.
"But given their straits with the US, with Israel, with sanctions, even if they quell these protests, they don&#x