U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have tracked evidence for years of Iranian efforts to target President Trump, with signals only increasing since the start of the war.
People pass a large banner depicting President Trump with a target on his head during funeral ceremonies for Iran’s slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the Grand Mosalla in Tehran on July 5.
Their desire to target Trump and his top aides began six years ago, just outside Baghdad International Airport, when the presidentthat killed Iran’s most powerful general. The assassination of Qassem Suleimani brought the two countries to the brink of war.
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,In a surprise swap, Trump flies back from Turkey in an old Air Force One, not jet from Qatar The switch raised questions about the gifted jet that the U.S. spent $400 million to retrofit. Images of the plane show it lacks some of key security features.
At Khamenei’s funeral ceremonies this week, red flags of vengeance flew throughout the capital as protesters explicitly called on their government to “kill Trump. ” His son, Mojtaba, the new supreme leader, was absent from the commemorations, fearing assassination himself. Mourners hold an anti-President Trump banner at the Imam Khomeini Grand Mosque during mass funeral prayers for Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family in Tehran on Sunday.
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.
Israeli news organizations have reported that Israel’s 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. A U.S. official told The Times that a range of serious threats exist against the president, including from Iran, but that Israel’s intelligence pointed to a more specific plot. The official did not provide further details.
Israeli officials did not respond to requests for comment.that the government sees vengeance against U.S. officials as “its legitimate duty and right,” and “will fulfill this great responsibility and duty with all its might. ” “The Suleimani killing accelerated a lifting of restraints on foreign assassinations — and the taboo on targeting and killing foreign leaders, with U.S. military assets, has been more or less lifted,” said Matt Dallek, a political professor at George Washington University.
“If 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’s only logical that other countries will be more inclined to also engage in assassinations,” Dallek added. “It does seem likely that Trump will have a bigger target on his back.
”to an old model of Air Force One — equipped with specialized defensive technologies — from a new plane given as a gift by Qatar, after the Secret Service warned of potential threats to the aircraft from Iran.
“They want to take out the U.S. leader — me,” Trump told reporters aboard the plane. “I’m on whatever list. I saw this morning I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far, I guess I’ve been a bit lucky, but maybe that doesn’t last very long.
” The threat has remained on his mind in the days since. In an interview with the New York Post, Trump told the reporter, “I hope you’ll miss me,” adding that he has “been on their list for a long time. ” 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.
“1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he wrote, “with 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! ”before Trump’s presidency, codified in an executive order signed by President Ford in 1976 over concerns of a CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro.
Iran has targeted American military sites in the gulf after the U.S. launched strikes on several places in Iran and reinstated sanctions on its oil sales. 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. Other administrations have been accused of targeting foreign leaders before.
Under the Obama administration, an international coalition targeting the Libyan regime of Moammar Qadafi during the country’s 2011 civil warBut experts say Trump’s explicit targeting of Suleimani and Khamenei — and his public celebration of their deaths — marks a new paradigm.
“Through words and actions, President Trump has done more to normalize political violence than any other U.S. president, certainly in modern times,” said Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago and author of “Our Own Worst Enemies: America in the Age of Violent Populism. ” “On the international front alone, the president routinely brags about killing Iranian leaders and seizing the leader of Venezuela, among others,” he added, “to the point that assassination is becoming the new normal in international politics.
”Michael Wilner is the Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times. He has spent more than a decade covering the federal government with a focus on the White House. Before joining The Times, Wilner was chief Washington correspondent for McClatchy, where his enterprise and international reporting was recognized with multiple awards. He previously covered foreign affairs in Washington and overseas for the Jerusalem Post.
Wilner is a graduate of Claremont McKenna College and Columbia University and is a native of New York City. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently approved California’s request to extend housing assistance to survivors of the Eaton and Palisades fires. But more than 18 months after those January 2025 fires, survivors are still waiting on an additional $16 billion in federal disaster relief from the federal government, which was revised down earlier this year from nearly $34 billion.
The Hillside Strangler murders terrorized Los Angeles in the late 1970s. The killers were a pair of sadistic cousins. One confessed. The other was set to stand trial—until L.A. prosecutors flinched.
Modern LA earned its first smoggy nickname 450 years ago, as the “bay of smokes. ” At the La Brea tar pits, we take a short walk through a long history with curator Regan Dunn, who explains how and why the first Angelenos would have set fires that filled the broad bowl of LA and foretold the curse of smog.
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