Trump Knows Iran Has Wanted Him Dead

The Atlantic

4 hours ago

Hours before launching B-2 bombers at Iran, President Donald Trump stood on a secured airport tarmac 40 miles west of Manhattan, under the watchful guard of the U.S. Secret Service and a militarized counterassault team. When a reporter asked about the risk of terror attacks on U.S. targets overseas by Iranian proxies, the world's most protected man instead spoke of his own risk of assassination.
'You are even in danger talking to me right now. You know that?' he said. 'So I should probably get out of here. But you guys are actually in danger. Can you believe it?' Before walking away, he looked a reporter in the eye. 'Be careful,' he said.
The threats against the president do not rank among the stated reasons for Trump's decision to target nuclear sites in Iran, and White House officials and other outside advisers told us they have not come up in meaningful Situation Room discussions. 'The president makes decisions on Iran based on what's in the best interest of the country and the world, not himself,' White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us.
But the fear of being killed at the behest of a foreign government has hung over the president and his senior team for months, an anxiety-producing din that has limited their daily routine, especially after two failed assassination attempts by alleged homegrown assailants. Now some Trump allies are privately wondering how much the ever-present risk is shaping the president's thinking about the current conflict.
At least twice in 2024, federal authorities gave private briefings to campaign leaders on the evolving Iranian threat and adjusted Trump's protection. The Justice Department revealed two indictments last year alone that described disrupted Iranian plots against U.S. officials. Top aides worried that Trump's Boeing 757 campaign plane, emblazoned with his name, would be shot out of the sky, and at one point they used a decoy plane—sending alarmed (and presumably more expendable) staff off on 'Trump Force One' while Trump himself flew separately on a friend's private plane, according to a Trump-campaign book by the Axios reporter Alex Isenstadt.
'Big threats on my life by Iran,' Trump posted on social media last September. 'The entire U.S. Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn't work out, but they will try again.'
Since this week's air strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, military and security analysts have been on guard for asymmetric responses, such as terrorist attacks and assassinations. The Department of Homeland Security warned of a 'heightened threat environment' in a Sunday bulletin and noted Iran's 'long-standing commitment to target US Government officials.' FBI agents who had been reassigned to focus on immigration were told over the weekend to focus back on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cyberissues, NBC News reported Tuesday.
Trump's two-week window for diplomacy was a smoke screen
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has denied his government's involvement in any assassination plots. But he and other Iranian leaders have done little to ease concerns. 'Iran reserves all options,' Abbas Araghchi, Iran's foreign minister, posted on X after the attack, before the country launched a missile barrage at a U.S. military base in Qatar that did little damage.
'Threat equals intent plus capability,' Matthew Levitt, an expert on Iranian operations at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told us. 'We are very clear on their intent. We are less clear going forward on their capabilities.'
Trump has publicly indicated that the focus of U.S. military action against Iran is narrowly tailored to its nuclear program. 'We want no nuclear. But we destroyed the nuclear,' he said in the Netherlands on Wednesday.
The question of Iran's assassination posture remains a sensitive one inside Trump's circle—'very top of mind,' one person, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, told us. And close allies assume it must also be for the president. 'It'd probably be in the back of my mind if I were him,' an outside White House adviser told us. During the run-up to the U.S. bombing of Iran, Tucker Carlson suggested in a debate with Texas Senator Ted Cruz that there needed to be an immediate attack on Iran if there was evidence of an assassination threat against Trump, even as he doubted the legitimacy of such reports. 'We should have a nationwide dragnet on this, and we should attack Iran immediately if that's true,' Carlson said.
Last year, then-President Joe Biden sent word to the Iranian regime that any assassination attempt against former U.S. officials would be considered an 'act of war,' according to people briefed on the plans, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Pezeshkian told NBC News in January 2025 that 'Iran has never attempted to, nor does it plan to, assassinate anyone.'
'At least as far as I know,' he continued, not entirely engendering confidence in the assessment.
Trump, in his less diplomatic style, has repeated Biden's warning, albeit in much more colorful language. He told reporters in the Oval Office in February that he had 'left instructions' for what should happen if he is murdered by Iran. 'If they do it, they get obliterated,' the president said. 'There will be nothing left.'
Such U.S. retaliation has a historical basis. When former President George H. W. Bush, his wife, and two sons survived an alleged car-bomb assassination attempt during a visit to Kuwait in 1993, U.S. investigators tied the plot—involving a Toyota Land Cruiser packed with plastic explosives—to Iraqi Intelligence Services. Months later, then-President Bill Clinton ordered retaliatory cruise-missile attacks on the intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. Nearly a decade later, President George W. Bush cited the foiled attack as part of his case for the U.S. military invasion of Iraq that toppled its president, Saddam Hussein. 'There is no doubt he can't stand us,' the younger Bush said of Hussein in 2002. 'After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad at one time.'
The Biden administration disclosed the latest specific allegations of a plot to kill Trump three days after last year's presidential election. In charging documents filed in federal court, the FBI described a phone interview it conducted during the heat of the campaign with Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national residing in Tehran, who had been deported from the U.S. in 2008 following a 14-year prison stay in New York for robbery. Prosecutors have charged Shakeri with attempting to hire hit men to kill an Iranian American journalist living in New York. But Shakeri claimed in his conversations with the FBI, according to the criminal complaint, to have received new orders in September from an official of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: kill Trump.
Shakeri told the FBI that he warned his contact that such an effort would cost a 'huge' amount of money, according to charging documents. In response, the Iranian official said, 'we have already spent a lot of money . . . [s]o money's not an issue,' Shakeri told the FBI. Shakeri further explained that he believed the official was referring to money already spent to try to assassinate Trump. Shakeri said his military contact asked on October 7 for an assasination plan to be delivered within seven days. If Shakeri failed to do so, he said the contact told him they would try again after the election, which the Iranians expected Trump to lose. (Such an assessment was also likely upsetting to Trump.)
Around the same time that Shakeri was charged, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced in an unclassified November 2024 report that 'Iranian officials continue to publicly reiterate their vows to conduct lethal operations in the United States.' The 'priority targets' listed in the report included Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and former Commander of U.S. Central Command Kenneth McKenzie, who were all directly involved in the 2020 assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
'I'll be taking precautions the rest of my life,' McKenzie told the United States Naval Institute and Coast Guard Academy last year.
Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.: Inside the decision to assassinate Iran's ruthless general
Soleimani was killed by a drone strike in Iraq, where U.S. officials said he was directing attacks against American forces. His death sparked calls for revenge against U.S. officials. In 2022, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei featured an animated video on his website that depicts a targeted assassination of Trump by Iranian drones as he golfs near his Mar-a-Lago estate. In the video, Trump receives a text message before he is killed that reads, 'Soleimani's murderer and the one who gave the order will pay the price.'
Such public calls could inspire a lone-wolf attacker. 'Part of the problem is it's not just hit men or just officials of the government that may be doing this,' Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton told us. 'The threat can come from a variety of different places. It's not just those expressly organized by the government in Tehran.'
Bolton has also been targeted for assassination by Iran for his role in the Soleimani strike, according to the Justice Department. The FBI is still offering a $20 million reward for any information that leads to the arrest of Shahram Poursafi, a uniformed member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for a 2022 plot to kill Bolton. Poursafi attempted to pay individuals as much as $300,000 to 'eliminate' Bolton in Washington or Maryland, including at one point providing an individual with specific details of Bolton's schedule that did not seem to be publicly available, according to court documents. (If Bolton was successfully dispatched with, Poursafi added at one point, he had a second 'job,' this one worth $1 million.)
The unclassified November 2024 report pointed to another alleged Iranian assassination plot that members of the government have separately said they believe included Trump. On August 6, U.S. prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint against Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national who had recently traveled to Iran. They alleged that he'd flown to Texas four months earlier to recruit others, including a confidential informant for the FBI, to assassinate 'U.S. officials,' according to a complaint filed in federal court. 'Specifically, Merchant requested men who could do the killing, approximately twenty-five people who could perform a protest as a distraction after the murder occurred, and a woman to do 'reconnaissance,'' the complaint stated.
The target of his assassination plot, he later told undercover law-enforcement officers posing as hit men, was a 'political person,' and the protests would take place at political rallies, according to the complaint. Merchant described himself as a 'representative,' a word the officers interpreted to mean he was working for other people outside the U.S. He was arrested after making plans to leave the country again.
Kori Schake, the director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, told us the threats from Iran 'should be taken incredibly seriously.' But she also pointed out that, almost immediately upon returning to office, Trump withdrew the security protections for some of his former officials facing similar danger, including Bolton and retired U.S. Army General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 'So either he doesn't take the threat of it that seriously or he's recklessly putting at risk former senior officials,' she concluded.
Bolton—still facing very real Iranian peril—was more blunt. 'Why doesn't he think about the assassination threat against him and his former officials? Well, he's as safe as anybody, and he doesn't care about the rest of us.'