Trump’s Obsession of Iranian Assassination Plots Against Him

Aug 18, 2026 01:22 PM EDT, Tue

Trump’s enduring focus: An Iranian assassination plot

The prospect that Iran might try to kill Trump has hung over the president since he had a top Iranian official assassinated more than six years ago.

Aug. 13, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT By David Rohde, Marc Santia, Emily Hung and Jake Traylor

The threat appears to loom large on President Donald Trump’s mind.

It has prompted missile launchers to surround the president on his golf courses. It led him to hide in an airline catering truck to surreptitiously switch planes as he left Turkey last month.

And it has spurred heightened worries among his protective detail and intelligence agencies already weighing a record number of threats to his life.

In public and private, Trump keeps musing about the possibility that Iran might assassinate him. Depending on the day, the prospect is floated as a simple fact of life, a warning to potential perpetrators and even a point of pride for the world’s most powerful leader.

The comments suggest that if Iranian leaders want Trump to be concerned about his safety six months into his war, they are succeeding.

“They want to take out the U.S. leader — me,” Trump said of Iran last month during a bilateral meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Ankara, Turkey.

“I’m on every list. I saw a thing this morning, I’m on every single one of their lists,” Trump said. “And so far I guess I’ve been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn’t last very long, because that’s the way it goes.”

This week’s revelation that Trump left his presidential aircraft and allowed it to become a decoy plane has consumed Washington. It has also highlighted the realities of heightened threats to his life, alongside questions about Iran’s true ability to eliminate an American president.

Trump, in fact, is the focus of more threats than any modern American president has been. Last month, a senior Secret Service official said the agency was investigating the highest number of threat cases in its history. The official said agents had examined 10,000 threat cases, 40% more than last year.

“What we are seeing now is something I’ve never seen before,” the senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “Threat environment is the highest we have seen.”

Agents have conducted some 3,000 protective visits to people who threatened to kill Trump and other federal officials, and many of the people making the threats have mental health issues, the official said. The Secret Service has also seen a tenfold increase in mental health commitments as a result of its investigations.

Threats against the president have prompted the Secret Service to place anti-aircraft and anti-drone systems near his homes in Bedminster, New Jersey, and West Palm Beach, Florida, during this second term — locations that did not have such systems in Trump’s first term, according to two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the sensitive measures.

Earlier this month, Trump aide Margo Martin posted a video to her X account showing Trump, wearing golf clothes, shaking hands with soldiers in New Jersey, where he owns a golf club. “I’m not worried about missiles or drones,” Trump says in the video, opening his arms wide.

“We got it covered right there,” says a soldier, gesturing over his shoulder at the tan-colored missile launchers of an Avenger short-range air defense system behind them.

Evidence of Iranian threats against Trump has been emerging for years.

During the investigation of the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, investigators uncovered evidence that while Iran played no role in that attempt, Iranian officials were interested in assassinating Trump.

Iran has had reasons to want to retaliate against Trump. During his first term, in January 2020, Trump ordered an American drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.

Since then, Iran has had a track record of targeting Trump and other American officials for assassination in the U.S. in retaliation for Soleimani’s death.

In 2022 federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C., charged a member of the IRGC with plotting to kill Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton in retaliation for the death of Soleimani. Federal prosecutors said the IRGC member offered to pay an Iranian American $300,000 to kill Bolton.

While Trump was running for re-election in October 2024, U.S. prosecutors said said the IRGC had told an Iranian operative to “focus on surveilling, and ultimately, assassinating” Trump and an Iranian dissident in New York, Masih Alinejad. The operative told two men, Carlisle Rivera, 49, of Brooklyn, and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, that they would be paid $100,000 for conducting the killings.

In Ankara last month, the Secret Service deployed the extraordinary ruse of having Trump secretly switch planes after receiving information regarding a potential Iranian plot to target Air Force One with a shoulder-fired missile, The New York Times reported.

Marc Polymeropoulos, a former senior CIA official and an MS NOW contributor, said the Secret Service was right to take the reports of a potential threat seriously.

“Turkey is not a benign environment for counterintelligence or terrorist threats. Iranian intelligence historically has had reach there, and has run aggressive operations against the U.S. in the past, per open-source reporting,” Polymeropoulos said. “The U.S. Secret Service would be right to take any threats seriously there, with these factors in mind.”

The president himself keeps coming back to the idea that he expected Iran to try to assassinate him.

Days after joint Israeli and U.S. strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Feb. 28, Trump struck a morbid note in one of his many phone interviews with reporters.

“I got him before he got me,” Trump told ABC News. “They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”

Since Trump returned safely from Ankara last month, he has continued to talk about Iranian threats to his life. In a phone interview with the New York Post on July 10, Trump said he had “left instructions” behind that, if he were killed by Iran, “to just literally bomb them at levels that they’ve never seen before.”

He added that he was at the top of Iran’s kill list and adopted a fatalistic tone.

“I’ve been No. 1 for a long time, and it’s the way life is, you know,” he said. “I hope you’ll miss me.”

And on Tuesday, Trump again talked about his own death and said he was a target for assassination because of all he had achieved as president.

“I have a lot of threats. I have a lot of threats that you don’t know about,” he told reporters returning from the Patriot Games in Ohio. “Any consequential president has a lot of threats. Non-consequential presidents don’t get threatened, and I think that I’m maybe the most consequential president.”

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

Marc Santia is an investigative correspondent for MS NOW.

Emily Hung is an associate White House producer for MS NOW.

Jake Traylor is a White House correspondent for MS NOW.

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