The Iranian government is actively plotting to kill Donald Trump, CNN reported today.
Sources told the network that the plot does not appear to be linked to the assassination attempt on Saturday. That intelligence, which came from a human source, prompted the Secret Service to surge “resources and assets” to protect the former president, according to one official who spoke to CNN.
Iranian threats to kill Trump and his top aides, over the 2020 killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, are not new. The Justice Department brought charges in 2022 against Iranian personnel who planned to kill former national-security adviser John Bolton, and the office of the Iranian supreme leader posted a cartoon online in 2022 depicting a drone strike against Trump on the golf course at Mar-a-Lago. Other top Trump-administration officials have received protective security details after they left government, in response to ongoing assassination threats.
But this is the first time that news of a direct, active threat against Trump has been brought to light.
Richard Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explained why Tehran has Trump in its sights. “Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, in a post to X. “The regime knows maximum pressure will return,” he said, referring to the Trump-era sanctions strategy that squeezed the Iranian economy.
After the supreme leader’s office posted the 2022 video calling for Trump’s assassination, Representative Jim Banks faulted the Biden administration for continuing to pursue a return to the 2015 nuclear agreement with Tehran.
Though the administration has failed to reach such an agreement with Iran in the years since, it has continued to relieve the pressure the U.S. placed on Iran under Trump. When news of the ongoing Iranian threat against Trump’s life broke today, Iran’s new acting foreign minister, Ali Bagheri, was in New York on a visa presumably granted by the State Department so that he could attend meetings at the U.N.