Tehran’s efforts to assassinate the former president deserve a united, bipartisan response.
Tehran’s efforts to assassinate the former president deserve a united, bipartisan response.
T he Justice Department has been dancing around it. The Pakistani national “with close ties to Iran” arrested in August had allegedly been dispatched to the U.S. “to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil,” according to the DOJ. But in truth, not just any politician would do. Law enforcement had long warned that Iran-backed agents were determined to mete out revenge for the strike that neutralized Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Only a ranking Trump administration official — Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Donald Trump himself — would satisfy Tehran’s desire for payback.
Following the first attempt on Trump’s life, reporters got wind of active Iranian assassination plots being tracked by U.S. intelligence, but only to dismiss the rumors that the assassin in Butler, Pa., had been directed by Iran. And yet, that threat has not abated. Rather, it seems to be maturing.
The Trump campaign revealed on Tuesday that it had been briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence regarding the nature of the plots against Trump. “Intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months,” a campaign statement read, “and law enforcement officials across all agencies are working to ensure President Trump is protected and the election is free from interference.” The Islamic Republic’s goal is to “to assassinate” Trump “in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.”
The briefing was a long time coming. Indeed, Trump had complained last month that he and his allies should be privy to a more granular breakdown of the intelligence around Iran’s desire to decapitate the Republican Party ahead of November’s vote. But whatever Trump officials heard in this briefing, it was sobering enough to induce in them a level of solemnity rarely seen from Trump or his subordinates. Stripped of the bombast and hyperbole that typically accompanies Trump campaign pronouncements (save a jab thrown at the campaign’s Democratic opponent near the end), the statement suggested that the candidate and his allies may actually be attempting reserved circumspection in the face of a foreign-directed effort to murder him. This must be serious.
But the Trump campaign had not behaved soberly enough for the Washington Post. Reporters Isaac Arnsdorf and Shane Harris took exception to Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung’s “effort to disparage his opponent” when he wrote that “the terror regime in Iran loves the weakness of Kamala Harris” and “is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Trump.” That is a claim “without evidence,” the Post’s reporters note. It goes “beyond U.S. intelligence assessments.”
Yes, well, we can reasonably infer that Tehran has a horse in this race insofar as it is trying to kill one of the candidates. And no one, including the Post’s reporters, disputes Western intelligence and security agencies’ assessment that Iran’s motive is vengeance for the 2020 strike on its IRGC commander. Moreover, the report makes note of the corroborating evidence that Iran is implicated in multiple hacks of Trump campaign email accounts, in which its agents absconded with campaign secrets and retailed them to both U.S. media outlets and the Biden campaign itself. A rather lopsided pattern has emerged.
Still, the Post’s reporters hammered their grievance with the Trump campaign’s failure to stop behaving like a campaign. “Deprecating Harris as ‘weak’ has been a core message of Trump’s campaign since she replaced Biden as the presumptive Democratic nominee in July,” the dispatch continued. Thus, it is implied, the Trump camp is leveraging the threat to the candidate’s life for political gain.
Kamala Harris and her allies in the media are self-conscious about the target on Trump’s back. They fear that it will generate sympathy for him and induce reflexive support for his candidacy from persuadable voters who understandably resent foreign interference in American elections. This trigger-happy sniping at the way the Trump camp “overstates intelligence to accuse Iran of favoring Harris,” as the headline read, is evidence of that insecurity. But the flourish at the end of Trump’s statement isn’t the headline here. It’s a tertiary detail in an otherwise epochal revelation: Iran is trying to kill an American president on U.S. soil.
Whether or not it is in the Democratic Party’s immediate political interest, Americans are obliged to internalize the gravity of that discovery. Even if the plot never fully flowers, its very existence represents an attack by a hostile foreign power on the United States. The American reaction to it should be severe.
The Biden administration should recommit to enforcing sanctions targeting Iranian oil exports that it recently relaxed and crack down on illicit sales to countries like India and China. It should withdraw the privileges it extends to Iran’s tacit allies in the Middle East like Qatar. It should redouble its support for Israel’s kinetic campaign against Iran’s vassals in Gaza and Lebanon, and it should take the gloves off in the Red Sea. If Iran is undeterred to the point that it would green-light an operation as brazen as this, it’s incumbent on this administration to restore deterrence by raising the costs of Tehran’s provocations beyond the point at which they seem worth the risk.
If that sounds fanciful, it’s only because the Biden administration has established for itself a record that suggests its paralyzing fear of escalation anywhere will prevent it from doing what it must to ensure that Iran and its agents pay a due price for harming (or plotting to harm) U.S. citizens. To draw too much attention to Iran’s designs on Trump wouldn’t advance the Democratic Party’s political interests anyway, so we can expect that the party and its confederates in the press will soft-sell this assault on American sovereignty. But then, who in this equation is contemptibly deferring to their own parochial political incentives?
The Biden-Harris administration should be compelled not only by propriety and civic decency but by patriotism to form a united front with the GOP in aggrieved opposition to the Iranian threat. There is a bipartisan history in this country of presidents defending their predecessors from foreign-directed attacks via the application of overwhelming force. The prospect of a similar response to Iranian aggression should at least be held out as a live possibility — if only to focus the minds of the Islamic Republic’s theocrats who do not believe their regime would survive a direct conflict with the United States.
Some things transcend domestic politics. A foreign threat like this is one of those things. Whoever wins this election will have to contend with the Iranian menace. We can deduce from recent developments that a Trump presidency would take seriously the need to contain Iranian aggression. If the Biden White House’s response to the threat against Trump is any indication, we have no such assurances about Kamala Harris.