Donald Trump doesn't like having a bullseye on his person. Iran has been threatening his life for years and lately, U.S. intelligence told the Trump campaign that “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States" were underway.
Big threats on my life by Iran. The entire U.S. Military is watching and waiting. Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone. I am surrounded by more men, guns, and weapons than I have ever seen before. Thank you…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 25, 2024
There's no direct evidence that Thomas Matthew Crooks, who took a shot at Trump in Pennsylvania and wounded him, or Ryan Wesley Routh, who shot at the former president in Florida and missed, were connected to Iran in any way.
But there was another plot that involved the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who hired a hit man to target Trump. Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national, shadowed Trump, attending rallies and traveling to his appearances. He had been promised $1 million by the Revolutionary Guards if he killed Trump.
Little is known of Merchant’s life beyond his Pakistani nationality, and that he traveled frequently from Pakistan to Iran. After the news of his arrest, an Indian news site wrote that he had grown up in a wealthy Karachi family, and controlled a $70 million portfolio. But according to the leaked document—a proffer, or summary of information a suspect offers while negotiating for leniency—he told the FBI that he got involved with IRGC for the money. This April, he flew to Texas, where he appears to have family, then on June 3 on to New York, where he was met at LaGuardia airport by the person who would turn out to be the informant. In a Long Island hotel, according to the publicly filed arrest affidavit, Merchant announced that their partnership would not be in clothing imports but assassination, which he illustrated by making a “finger gun.”
Merchant “understood that the killing was related to Iran’s retaliation for the death of Qasem Soleimani," said a document leaked by a whistleblower who gave Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) the information. If not for an FBI informant who managed to wrangle his way into Merchant's confidence, anything could have happened.
It's not surprising that Trump, who received the briefing from the office of the Director of National Intelligence on Tuesday, led off his speech in North Carolina by talking about Iran's determination to kill him.
“But as the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, if you do anything to harm this person we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We’re going to blow it to smithereens,” Trump said to applause. “And there would be no more threats.”
He continued, “Meanwhile, we have the president of Iran in our country this week. We have large security forces guarding him, and yet they are threatening our former presidents and the leading candidate to become the next president — certainly a strange set of circumstances.”
As Democrats continue to demonize Trump and portray him as an existential threat to democracy, they are sowing the seeds of their own downfall. Iran is another matter. Killing Trump would end the regime in Tehran and throw the Middle East into even more chaos than it is now, perhaps triggering a regional or World War.
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