Alistair Hobson
New Lines Magazine / August 20, 2026
Did the US president’s belief that Ayatollah Khamenei was intent on killing him influence his fateful decision to launch a war?
Before the 12-day war and the U.S.-Israeli Operation Epic Fury, President Donald Trump established the link between his personal safety and the destruction of Iran. In February 2025, when he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, Trump answered questions about the Iranian regime’s efforts to assassinate him. The Department of Justice had earlier released details of two separate Iranian plots to kill Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.
The first involved a Pakistani national, Asif Merchant, who was arrested on July 12, 2024, after being entrapped by FBI officials; the second, an Afghan national with U.S. citizenship named Farhad Shakeri, was charged with conspiring to organize the assassination of Trump from Iran in November 2024. Trump told the press that it would be a “terrible thing” if Iran assassinated him, not because of what would happen to him, but because of what would happen to Iran. They would be “obliterated,” he said. “I’ve left instructions.”
The breakdown of the distinction between the private and the public, the personal and the national, in Trump’s second term makes the president’s perception that Iran is trying to kill him especially salient. Trump’s psychology, how he understands his personal interests and his safety are now critical factors in how the United States conducts itself in the world. According to the leading account of the lead-up to the war, many of Trump’s closest advisers and cabinet members opposed a U.S. war on Iran in February 2026, while grave risks of such a war were understood and articulated by figures such as Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And yet Trump chose to launch the war anyway, even though it was generally unpopular with the public and had prominent sceptics within the MAGA movement.
So why did Trump make this fateful choice — one that risks destroying his presidency, destabilizing the global economy and precipitating a humiliating strategic defeat for the U.S.? To be sure, many have pointed to the influence of Israeli intelligence in general, and of Netanyahu in particular, as answers. And yet what may have made Trump even more susceptible to such influence was his belief that Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei was intent on killing him; that he needed to get the ayatollah “first,” as he said on March 2, before the ayatollah got him.
While this personal element in decisions of war by a U.S. president has become more accentuated during Trump’s second presidency, it is a trend with important historical precedents over the past 50 years. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan was told that the Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi had sent hit squads to the U.S. to assassinate him. George W. Bush believed that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had tried to assassinate his father, George H. W. Bush, after his presidency had ended. In each case, these personal motivations were widely publicized and useful in selling the antagonism to the public. With respect to U.S. presidential decision-making over Libya in the 1980s and Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s, we can see important similarities between Reagan and the Bushes on the one hand, and Trump on the other.
Yet more than in those earlier cases, in Trump’s second term we have witnessed a president who has for years believed himself to be the target of another state’s revenge, an increasing centralization of power in the presidency accumulated over years of the “war on terror,” an increasingly conspiratorial culture in the United States and a succession of undeniable spurs to Iranian revenge against Trump. All of this has set up a pattern of U.S.-Iranian escalation that has come to act as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Trump’s choice to assassinate Iran’s Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3, 2020, was among the most provocative military acts of his first term. Trump framed it as the killing of the “world’s leading terrorist,” apparently the sequel to the assassination of Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi just months earlier. An additional pretext for Soleimani’s assassination was that Iran was planning an imminent attack on a U.S. Embassy, though no evidence for this assertion has ever been publicly released. While an American had been killed in Iraq in the preceding weeks, allegedly by a Shiite militia, the assassination of such an important Iranian regime figure at Baghdad International Airport, along with leaders in an Iraqi militia, was like skipping “ten rungs on the escalation ladder,” as one group of analysts put it. Yet Trump, in boastfully announcing the raid’s success, claimed that “we took action last night to stop a war. We did not take action to start a war.”
In response, Khamenei said that Soleimani had been martyred by the “most vile of humans” and promised that the criminals responsible would suffer “severe revenge.” Some Iranian and Iraqi mourners chanted that revenge was coming to Soleimani’s murderers. Five days later, Iran launched a ballistic missile barrage on two U.S. bases in Iraq under the name Operation Martyr Soleimani. The attack did cause severe injury to U.S. personnel and material damage to a fleet of drones, but since no Americans were killed in the retaliation, many presumed that further escalation could be avoided. It turned out that Iranian officials had warned U.S. officials of the impending missile barrage hours before, so that they could prepare accordingly. The Iranian regime wanted revenge for Soleimani, but it did not want a direct confrontation with the U.S.
Yet neither the Iranian regime nor Kataib Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Iraq also targeted in the U.S. strike on Soleimani, were done with revenge for the strike that killed Soleimani. In March 2020, Kataib Hezbollah fired rockets at a U.S. base in Iraq, killing two and wounding at least nine others. The Trump administration ordered retaliatory strikes in Iraq but once again sought to avoid further escalation. Trump sensed the peril of a costly war. Then, as the one-year anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination approached, Khamenei renewed his promise of revenge, saying that Soleimani’s killers “must know” that they would “face revenge” at the “appropriate time.” Khamenei suggestively tweeted an aerial image of Trump playing golf.
The Iranian regime’s promise that all those responsible for Soleimani’s assassination faced revenge cast a shadow over the U.S. national security state from 2020 on. The Iranian judiciary listed 96 American suspects in the case of Soleimani’s murder, and during the Biden presidency numerous national security state figures tied to the Soleimani incident received round the clock security details. Among the most prominent targets were former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who had long been one of the most zealous public advocates for a U.S. attack on Iran. In 2022, the Justice Department charged a member of the IRGC in a murder for hire scheme directed at Bolton in retaliation for the killing of Soleimani, despite the fact that Trump had fired Bolton months before the operation and therefore he had not been operationally involved.
At the same time, Khamenei’s promise followed Trump into his post-presidency. Each year, Iranian officials renewed the vow to bring Trump to justice.. On the second anniversary of the assassination, Iran’s then-President Ebrahim Raisi said at an event honouring Soleimani that “the aggressor, murderer and main culprit — the then-president of the United States — must be tried and judged under the law of retribution, and God’s ruling must be carried out against him.” Days later, an animated video appeared on Khamenei’s official website depicting a robot calling in a drone strike on Trump at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Trump campaign aide and future chief of staff Susie Wiles later claimed that Trump chose not to attend the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest because his aides doubted whether the Secret Service could protect him from an Iranian assassination attempt.
During Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, the general threat of assassination he was thought to face and the specific threat coming from Iran began to converge. Already in 2023, as Trump prepared for another presidential run, his supporters expressed trepidation about his being a target for assassination. Tucker Carlson articulated this fear on his show on X in September 2023, asking Trump about it in an interview. Yet it was not the Iranian threat Carlson was concerned about, but one much closer to home.
While he left it vague, Carlson alluded to those who wanted to stop Trump’s political career, the same people he claimed were trying to prosecute the former president under numerous jurisdictions and who wanted to disqualify him from the presidency. Elements in those circles, presumably affiliated with the “deep state,” might be willing to take the next step and see Trump killed, Carlson implied.
Trump then survived assassination attempts in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024 and another at a Palm Beach golf course in September 2024. At one point, a Secret Service officer shot down a drone hovering over Trump’s motorcade in Pennsylvania. None of these incidents were linked directly to Iran. Yet, in between the Butler and Palm Beach incidents, Trump was notified by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department of an Iranian plot to assassinate him. Trump then took the step of linking those assassination attempts to Iran. Aides close to Trump leaked to the press that the threat of being targeted by Tehran was colouring Trump’s approach to dealing with Iran on the policy front.
When we consider Trump’s experience on the campaign trail — having his ear nicked by an assassin’s bullet and the conspiracy theorizing taking place among his base that had little to do with Iran — it’s striking to compare the scant attention Trump gave to the assassination attempts he actually experienced with the far greater attention to the threat posed by Iran. For example, following the dramatic event in Butler in which an assassin came within inches of killing Trump, Trump chose to speak about the incident only once, at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that summer. He showed almost no interest in probing 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks’ motivations or linking Crooks to any conspiracy (though the lack of information about Crooks deepened the suspicions of many of Trump’s followers). In fact, Trump hardly altered anything about his planned appearance at the Republican convention after Crooks’ attack, which left him slightly injured.
By contrast, in response to alleged Iranian plots against him on the campaign trail, Trump did change his routine. At one point, Trump flew on his friend Steve Witkoff’s private plane, leaving Trump Force One as a decoy, because of threats that Iranian agents might use portable missiles to down the plane. In response to the threat from Iran, Biden authorized increased Secret Service protection for Trump.
Trump explained his response to the Iranian threat for his base on social media, posting that summer that there were “big threats on my life by Iran.” He later elaborated, referring to himself in the third person: “If they do ‘assassinate President Trump,’ which is always a possibility, I hope that America obliterates Iran, wipes it off the face of the Earth — If that does not happen, American Leaders will be considered ‘gutless’ cowards!”
Note the seamless transition from the threat to his life to his call for obliterating and wiping Iran off the face of the Earth. While many commentators expressed shock at Trump’s use of such genocidal language during the 2026 war, few noticed the continuity with Trump’s rhetoric in response to Iranian threats years earlier. At the same time, the fact that the Iranian regime was targeting Trump specifically for his decision to assassinate Soleimani, and not simply because he was Trump, became more obscured.
Examples from the presidencies of Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush provide a historical context in which to place this personalist dimension of Trump’s presidency. In particular, earlier examples show how perceived threats to the president, and to personal and familial safety, can become factors in presidential decision-making and the overall environment in which policy is made. In the case of Reagan, the threat of assassination posed by Gadhafi appeared to factor into the president’s thinking. At first glance, the dynamic between Reagan and Gadhafi bears resemblance to that between Trump and Khamenei. Then there is the case of the alleged Iraqi assassination plot against George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. Clinton, who was president at the time, chose to invoke Article 51 of the United Nations Charter to justify a military retaliation against Iraq for the plot. Later, George W. Bush cited Hussein’s attempt to kill his father as evidence of Hussein’s inveterate and “irrational hatred” of the U.S., as he built his case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The Libyan threat to Reagan, other senior officials in his administration and their families became salient not long after Reagan entered the White House in January 1981. Federal law enforcement officials informed the administration that year of ostensibly credible reports that Libyan-trained “hit squads” had been dispatched to the U.S. under orders to assassinate the president and potentially other leading officials. What added credibility to this scenario was that Libya had sent hit teams to Europe over the preceding year to assassinate Libyan dissidents in public. Moreover, Gadhafi had by that point acquired a reputation as a leading state sponsor of international terrorism, and he was believed to have close ties to such figures as Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or “Carlos the Jackal,” one of the world’s most wanted terrorists. In fact, some press reports alleged that “Carlos” was believed to be the leader of one of the hit squads designated to target Reagan. These teams were expected to do so either by using surface-to-air missiles to shoot down Air Force One or to fire on Reagan’s presidential limousine. Reagan altered his routine in response to this threat, sometimes traveling in unmarked vehicles. He also stopped attending church with his wife Nancy so as not to put his congregation at risk. As Reagan put it in his 1990 memoir, “An American Life”: “Very unhappily, we just had to stop going to church altogether, and we really missed it.” The fact that Reagan had been seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in March 1981 made his perception of the risk posed by the alleged Libyan plot seem more real, though the would-be assassin had no connection to Libya and was later found not guilty by way of insanity and committed to a psychiatric facility.
What was new about the Libyan hit squad threat to Reagan was not so much the threat itself but rather the degree to which the White House publicized it. It became a major news story in the latter half of 1981, with administration officials commenting on it frequently. This publicity went against conventional wisdom among experts at the time who cautioned that drawing attention to threats was precisely what terrorists craved. Former President Jimmy Carter criticized the Reagan administration for boosting attention on Gadhafi and making him seem more important than he was. At the same time, however, the Reagan administration did not publicize any evidence of the threat. As Reagan told the media, Gadhafi knows “we have it,” but the public apparently didn’t need to know what “it” was. Yet most of the U.S. political elite took the threat to Reagan seriously, believing it to be real and imminent. A year later, however, the Libyan threat to Reagan’s safety was understood to have dwindled. Gadhafi, for his part, believed that Reagan was trying to kill him.
The question to ask in hindsight is how much the perception of this threat and how it disrupted Reagan’s routine primed him to see Gadhafi as a national security threat to the U.S. For Reagan and the American public, there was a chain of associations from Gadhafi to Middle Eastern terrorists, to murderous attacks on innocent Americans in Europe and potentially in the U.S. It was in fact Libya where Reagan chose to stage the largest military retaliation for terrorism of his presidency, in 1986, with the bombing of Benghazi and Tripoli in Operation El Dorado Canyon. The one-night bombing raid targeted the military barracks where Gadhafi lived, from which he barely escaped that night. The famed investigative reporter Seymour Hersh contended at the time that the intent of the raid had been to kill Gadhafi, which would have been in contravention of U.S. law. As with Trump and Iran decades later, the personal threat commingled with an alleged imminent threat to the nation, blurring the distinction between the two and providing the backdrop and justification for military action.
This was also the case with the alleged Iraqi attempt to assassinate ex-president George H. W. Bush in Kuwait in 1993. When Bush had gone to Kuwait to celebrate the conclusion of Operation Desert Storm, Kuwaiti authorities had uncovered a car on the Kuwaiti side of the Iraqi border filled with high explosives, which then led to the unravelling of an Iraqi plot to kill Bush. Clinton waited for the FBI to conduct its own investigation, and when that report confirmed Iraqi responsibility for the plot in June 1993, he authorized a cruise missile attack on Baghdad, aimed at the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence.
Significant here was how Clinton explained the retaliation, which killed eight civilians, to the American public. Clinton claimed that an attack on a former president was an attack on “the nation,” on “us all,” and therefore warranted proportional retaliation. Furthermore, as Reagan had done with the Libya bombing, the Clinton administration invoked Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which permits unilateral military action in self-defense against an imminent threat of aggression.
Combined, these moves presaged the kind of logic at work in Trump’s aggression toward Iran. The president and the nation have been utterly conflated, such that a threat to the former becomes inherently a threat to the whole. Trump could claim in one breath that he was launching a war to stave off an imminent threat from Iran and add in the next breath that he “got” Khamenei before the supreme leader “got” him.
The alleged Iraqi plot against the elder Bush continued to be a factor in U.S.-Iraqi relations after Clinton’s “proportional” retaliation. When George W. Bush was building the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2002, he cited Hussein’s attempt to kill his “dad” as evidence of the unmitigated hatred that the Iraqi dictator held for the U.S. In other words, Bush made the same move Clinton had, equating his father with the nation. In Bush’s case, the line between “dad” and “ex-president” was blurred, giving his aim of toppling Hussein even more of a personal dimension. The personalization of the enemy in Hussein resembles the personalization of the Iranian enemy in Khamenei.
The Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, in conjunction with its developing Iran policy during the first year of the second term, complicated the relationship with influencers in the MAGA movement. Figures like Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk had expected Trump to bring transparency to the Oval Office and to undo the “conspiracy” to conceal the crimes of Epstein and his associates from the public. This task was presumed to be in Trump’s wheelhouse, since the belief was that the same deep state seeking to destroy Trump was also behind the Epstein conspiracy. The expectations were furthered by the appointment to the FBI of figures like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, both of whom were public personalities who had focused on Epstein with their podcast audiences. Attorney General Pam Bondi then raised expectations further in February 2025 when she told Congress that she had the Epstein files for review on her desk. And yet the full release is yet to come.
Figures like Carlson and Kirk were also using their inroads with Trump to warn him about succumbing to Israeli pressure to attack Iran. Carlson was most stark in warning Trump that it would destroy his presidency. In a phone call during the June 2025 war, Carlson reportedly scolded Trump for subordinating himself to a weaker power like Israel.
The assassination of Kirk in Orem, Utah, in September 2025 fundamentally changed the environment in which the threat to Trump was being perceived. In the wake of Kirk’s assassination there was a predictable fight over Kirk’s legacy, and one of the chief points of contention was Kirk’s stance on Israel. The 12-day war in June of that year had gravely concerned some on the right, like Kirk, about Trump being dragged into a war in Iran that would compromise his pledge to stay out of so-called “forever” wars in the Middle East. It was reported that Kirk had expressed these concerns to Trump, including in the days before his assassination. This fed conspiratorial claims on the right, exemplified first by former Turning Point USA influencer Candace Owens, that Israel might have had a hand in Kirk’s assassination — and that the motive behind it was not only to remove this influential figure who opposed the U.S. going to war in Iran, but also to send a warning to Trump that Israel was capable of political assassination in the U.S. This would make the message behind Netanyahu’s gift to Trump of the golden pager in February 2025 yet more explicit. This line of thinking so soon after Kirk’s assassination compelled Netanyahu to publicly deny Israel’s involvement in Kirk’s murder on Fox News.
Trump’s decision to launch a war on Iran along with Israel in February 2026 intensified this rupture between the president and some right-wing influencers. What was unusual about the buildup to the war was that the Trump administration made practically no attempt to sell the war to the U.S. public. At the State of the Union address a mere four days before the war, the president barely mentioned Iran. And yet the massive buildup of U.S. forces around the Middle East during the negotiations with Iran signalled his intentions. We can surmise from Trump’s striking lack of effort to sell the war to the public — in sharp contrast to the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003 — that the administration knew this would be unpopular within Trump’s own base and thought it would not be the protracted quagmire that is has become.
But the interpretation that became prevalent in the Carlson wing of MAGA was that Trump had been manipulated into the war by Netanyahu. Further, the war represented a betrayal of the America First ideal and could only be explicable by Trump’s manipulation. This convergence — the Epstein files, the Kirk assassination, Trump’s uncharacteristic decision-making — suggested that the president must be the victim of blackmail, or must be scared for his safety, not due to Iran but rather due to Israel. As Carlson put it on April 10, 2026, “the Israeli government has a storied history of blackmailing U.S. presidents.” According to this logic, Trump could face the same fate as Kirk.
The revelation of Trump’s “escape” from the July NATO summit has combined Trump’s fear of assassination with humiliation. Coming back from the NATO summit in Ankara in July, Trump changed his travel plans, leaving Air Force One through a catering truck, and then flying on a separate plane to London. He then switched planes again. All this resulted, it now appears, from a tip supplied by Israeli intelligence of an Iran-supported plot to down Air Force One with Trump inside it using a surface-to-air missile fired from inside Turkey. It was a recapitulation of the threat to Trump Force One during the 2024 campaign and very similar to the one directed against Reagan by Libya early in the Reagan administration.
The difference is that the reaction from elements like Carlson has not been to fear for Trump’s safety due to Iranian plots, but rather to see this as another Israeli attempt to manipulate Trump. In other words, the entire threat of assassination by Iran is now seen by some as an elaborate ruse, a hoax intended to manipulate Trump into re-escalating the war. And Trump’s apparent submission to this ruse, and his obvious fear of assassination, as shown by his frantic escape from Air Force One in Ankara, amount to a humiliation of not only Trump but also the office of the U.S. president — a far cry from the America First sovereignty that these audiences had expected Trump to project.
The more that Iranian assassination threats against Trump are publicized, the more Trump appears to some to be the victim of an Israeli psychological operation. Because the likes of Carlson dismiss the actual plots against Trump as factually baseless and far-fetched, to them it is more humiliating that Trump would respond to them in any way. Yet Trump remains a target for Iranian revenge for killing Soleimani, Khamenei, children at a school in Minab and many others. The Iranian demand for revenge against Trump was evident at the funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, along with the imagery within Iran showing a bullet heading for Trump’s head. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps released a statement during the proceedings asserting that “blood vengeance” for Khamenei and the others killed by U.S. and Israeli bombing was a “certain, legitimate and unforgettable demand.” This remains the context in which Trump is making decisions, while the president’s psychology might be the most decisive factor in determining how this disastrous war is resolved.
Alistair Hobson teaches history at Mississippi State University
