{"id":928271,"date":"2026-07-11T17:29:33","date_gmt":"2026-07-11T17:29:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/928271\/"},"modified":"2026-07-11T17:29:33","modified_gmt":"2026-07-11T17:29:33","slug":"assassinations-unleashed-under-trump-haunt-iran-war-endgame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/928271\/","title":{"rendered":"Assassinations unleashed under Trump haunt Iran war endgame"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Shortly before President Trump ended a ceasefire with Iran<\/a> this week, Israeli officials presented his team with intelligence indicating Tehran was hatching new plots to kill him.<\/p>\n

It was not the first such warning. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have tracked evidence for years<\/a> of Iranian efforts to target the president, with signals only increasing since the start of the war.<\/p>\n

Their desire to target Trump and his top aides began six years ago, just outside Baghdad International Airport, when the president ordered a drone strike<\/a> that killed Iran\u2019s most powerful general. The assassination of Qassem Suleimani brought the two countries to the brink of war.<\/p>\n

Yet even as full-scale war was averted, top Iranian officials vowed revenge for the strike, authorizing attempts on the lives not just of the president, but of his secretary of State and national security advisor, among others, even after they had left office<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, calls for revenge have reached a sharper pitch in Tehran, after a joint U.S.-Israeli operation killed Iran\u2019s supreme leader<\/a>, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of the war in February. <\/p>\n

At Khamenei\u2019s funeral ceremonies this week, red flags of vengeance flew throughout the capital as protesters explicitly called on their government to \u201ckill Trump.\u201d His son, Mojtaba, the new supreme leader, was absent from the commemorations, fearing assassination himself.<\/p>\n

\"Mourners <\/p>\n

Mourners hold an anti-President Trump banner at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque during mass funeral prayers for Iran\u2019s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family in Tehran on Sunday. <\/p>\n

(Morteza Nikoubazl \/ NurPhoto via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The prospect of foreign assassination plots targeting U.S. leaders puts the United States in dangerous new territory, where its embrace of political killings could ultimately place its own officials at unprecedented risk. And experts fear the existential threat of assassination has pushed peace further out of reach: When both sides believe their survival is at stake, the trust required for diplomacy becomes far harder to achieve.<\/p>\n

Israeli news organizations have reported that Israel\u2019s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, cited Iranian attempts to kill Trump in recent years as part of his case to go to war in the first place.<\/p>\n

A U.S. official told The Times that a range of serious threats exist against the president, including from Iran, but that Israel\u2019s intelligence pointed to a more specific plot. The official did not provide further details. Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has said in recent months<\/a> that the government sees vengeance against U.S. officials as \u201cits legitimate duty and right,\u201d and \u201cwill fulfill this great responsibility and duty with all its might.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Suleimani killing accelerated a lifting of restraints on foreign assassinations \u2014 and the taboo on targeting and killing foreign leaders, with U.S. military assets, has been more or less lifted,\u201d said Matt Dallek, a political professor at George Washington University.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the United States sets the example of how to conduct international relations, and it is using assassination of foreign leaders as a political weapon, it\u2019s only logical that other countries will be more inclined to also engage in assassinations,\u201d Dallek added. \u201cIt does seem likely that Trump will have a bigger target on his back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Returning from a NATO summit in Turkey on Wednesday, Trump was forced to switch back<\/a> to an old model of Air Force One \u2014 equipped with specialized defensive technologies \u2014 from a new plane given as a gift by Qatar, after the Secret Service warned of potential threats to the aircraft from Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey want to take out the U.S. leader \u2014 me,\u201d Trump told reporters aboard the plane. \u201cI\u2019m on whatever list. I saw this morning I\u2019m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I\u2019ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn\u2019t last very long.\u201d<\/p>\n

The threat has remained on his mind in the days since. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump told the reporter, \u201cI hope you\u2019ll miss me,\u201d adding that he has \u201cbeen on their list for a long time.\u201d And in a subsequent social media post Friday night, he warned of a catastrophic response he instructed the administration to pursue in the event Tehran succeeds.<\/p>\n

\u201c1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,\u201d he wrote, \u201cwith thousands of more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat, pronounced in many corners of the Globe, to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate, the sitting President of the United States of America, in this case, ME!\u201d<\/p>\n

The United States had a decades-old prohibition against assassinating foreign leaders<\/a> before Trump\u2019s presidency, codified in an executive order signed by President Ford in 1976 over concerns of a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro.<\/p>\n

The policy was only strengthened further by subsequent administrations, fearing a new international standard for targeted killings could result in unintended consequences in the halls of Washington.<\/p>\n

Other administrations have been accused of targeting foreign leaders before. Under the Obama administration, an international coalition targeting the Libyan regime of Moammar Kadafi during the country\u2019s 2011 civil war struck his fleeing convoy<\/a>, leading to his capture and killing by rebel fighters.<\/p>\n

But experts say Trump\u2019s explicit targeting of Suleimani and Khamenei \u2014 and his public celebration of their deaths \u2014 marks a new paradigm.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough words and actions, President Trump has done more to normalize political violence than any other U.S. president, certainly in modern times,\u201d said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of \u201cOur Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cOn the international front alone, the president routinely brags about killing Iranian leaders and seizing the leader of Venezuela, among others,\u201d he added, \u201cto the point that assassination is becoming the new normal in international politics.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Shortly before President Trump ended a ceasefire with Iran this week, Israeli officials presented his team with intelligence…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":928272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[43175,1582,276,9958,114275,374383,3062,83,337364,2961,224,5337,6291,5207,277,374384,67,131,2452,1628],"class_list":["post-928271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-assassination","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-country","tag-existential-threat","tag-foreign-leader","tag-intelligence","tag-iran","tag-israeli-official","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-other","tag-president","tag-trump","tag-u-s-leader","tag-united-states","tag-war","tag-week","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116902531410628752","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=928271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/928271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/928272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=928271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=928271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=928271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}