Assassinations unleashed under Trump haunt Iran war endgame

WASHINGTON— Shortly before President Trump ended the ceasefire with Iran this week, Israeli officials presented his team with intelligence showing Tehran was plotting new plots to kill him.

This was not the first such warning. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been tracking evidence of Iranian efforts to target the president for years, and the signals have only grown since the start of the war.

Their desire to target Trump and his top aides began six years ago, when the president ordered a drone strike just outside Baghdad International Airport that killed Iran’s most powerful general. The assassination of Qassem Soleimani brought the two countries to the brink of war.

But even if all-out war was averted, senior Iranian officials vowed to avenge the attack, allowing attempts on the lives of not only the president but also the secretary of state and national security adviser and others even after they left office.

Calls for revenge in Tehran grew sharper after a joint US-Israeli operation killed Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the start of the war in February.

At Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies this week, [last week for print] Red revenge flags flew in the capital as protesters publicly called on their government to “kill Trump.” His son, Mojtaba, the new religious leader, did not attend the commemorations for fear of being assassinated.

Foreign assassination plots targeting U.S. leaders are putting the United States into dangerous new territory where its embrace of political assassination could ultimately put its own officials at unprecedented risk. Experts fear that the existential threat of assassination is making peace even more elusive: When both sides believe their survival is at stake, it becomes much harder to establish the trust needed for diplomacy.

Israeli news organizations reported that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited Iran’s attempts to kill Trump in recent years as part of its case for going to war in the first place.

A US official told The Times that there were a number of serious threats against the president, including from Iran, but that Israeli intelligence pointed to a more specific conspiracy. The official did not provide further details. Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian, He said in the past months He said that the government sees it as its “legitimate duty and right” to take revenge on US officials and that it will “fulfill this great responsibility and duty with all its might.”

“The killing of Soleimani accelerated the lifting of restrictions on foreign assassinations, and the taboo of targeting and killing foreign leaders with U.S. military assets has more or less disappeared,” said Matt Dallek, a professor of politics at George Washington University.

“If the United States sets an example for how to conduct international relations and uses assassinations of foreign leaders as a political weapon, it stands to reason that other countries will be more likely to participate in assassinations,” Dallek added. “It seems likely that Trump has a larger target behind him.”

Trump, who returned from the NATO summit in Türkiye on Wednesday, was forced to switch from a new plane gifted by Qatar to an older Air Force One model equipped with special defense technologies after the Secret Service warned of potential threats to the plane from Iran.

“They want to eliminate the leader of the United States — me,” Trump told reporters on the plane. “I’m on every list. I saw this morning that I’m on every single one of them. I guess I’ve been a little lucky so far, but maybe it won’t last too long.”

The threat had been on his mind ever since. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump told the reporter, “I hope you miss me,” adding that he “has been on the list for a long time.” And in a social media post Friday night, he warned of a devastating response Tehran has ordered the administration to do if he succeeds.

“1,000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, “If the Government of Iran acts on the threat made in many corners of the world to assassinate or attempt to assassinate the sitting President of the United States, in this case me, there are thousands of missiles that will immediately follow!”

The United States had a decades-long ban against assassinating foreign leaders before Trump’s presidency, codified in a 1976 executive order signed by President Ford over concerns about a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro.

Fearing that a new international standard for targeted killings could have disastrous consequences in the halls of Washington, subsequent administrations further strengthened the policy.

Other administrations have been accused of targeting foreign leaders before. Under the Obama administration, an international coalition targeting Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya during the civil war in 2011 shot down his fleeing convoy, leading to his capture and death by rebel fighters.

But experts say Trump’s open targeting of Soleimani and Khamenei and his public celebration of their deaths points to a new paradigm.

“President Trump has done more, through his words and actions, to normalize political violence than any other U.S. president in modern times,” said Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor and author of “Our Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism.”

“On the international front alone, the president routinely boasts of killing Iranian leaders and capturing the Venezuelan leader, among others, so much so that assassination is becoming the new normal in international politics.”