Many may remember that President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order targeting Iran in February 2025, warning at the time that he had left instructions for the country to be “obliterated” if he was ever assassinated. “I’ve left instructions. If they do it, they get obliterated; there won’t be anything left,” Trump declared at the signing ceremony.
More than a year later, with the United States now at active war with Iran, that threat has been met with a direct one in return — and the long-running campaign by Tehran to kill Trump has taken on new and urgent dimensions.
On March 10, 2026, as U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran intensified, Iran’s top national security official issued what many analysts called the most direct public threat against a sitting U.S. president in memory. Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and one of the most powerful figures in the Islamic Republic’s clerical regime, threatened President Trump with assassination in a post on X, writing: “The freedom-loving nation of Iran is not afraid of your hollow threats. Even those who were mightier than you have failed to destroy the Iranian nation. Watch yourself — or you’ll be eliminated.”
The threat came after Trump posted on Truth Social that Iran would be hit “TWENTY TIMES HARDER” if it stopped the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. The message from Larijani was signed by the Supreme National Security Council of Iran and referenced the recent death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Trump brushed off the threat in an interview with CBS News, saying he “couldn’t care less.”
Following Khamenei’s killing on February 28 — the opening day of the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran — Larijani had also vowed on national television to hold Trump personally responsible for the supreme leader’s death.
While Iran was issuing fresh threats, the U.S. was simultaneously dismantling the very apparatus Iran had used to target Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that the leader of the Iranian unit behind a prior assassination attempt on Trump had been killed in U.S. military strikes. Hegseth announced, “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”
Trump addressed the killing directly on March 2, saying: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first,” linking the Iranian assassination attempts to the broader U.S. strikes against Iranian leadership.
Though Hegseth did not name the individual, Israeli reporter Amit Segal identified the person on X as Rahman Mokadam, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ special operations division.
The public threat from Larijani came just days after a major legal development in the U.S. Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national allegedly trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was found guilty in connection with a conspiracy to assassinate Trump. U.S. national security officials had previously warned the Trump campaign that Iran was actively targeting him and that multiple suspected operatives were believed to be operating inside the United States.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi said of the verdict: “This man landed on American soil hoping to kill President Trump — instead, he was met with the might of American law enforcement.” FBI Director Kash Patel added that the case was not Iran’s first attempt to harm Americans on U.S. soil.
Court records showed the extent of Iran’s reach. A newly released undercover video shown in a Brooklyn courtroom captured an alleged Iran-linked operative describing the 2024 plot in detail, placing a vape pen on a napkin to represent his target and asking: “This is the target. How will it die?”
The threats against Trump are not new — they trace directly to January 2020, when Trump ordered the drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Top Iranian officials have said publicly and repeatedly since then that they want revenge for Soleimani’s death, and that Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are targets.
Trump’s security team has taken those threats seriously for years. After the second assassination attempt on Trump in Florida in 2024 — which was not linked to Iran — his security detail was so concerned about the Iran threat that it had Trump travel to an event on a decoy plane owned by Steve Witkoff.
The Justice Department has documented multiple alleged Iranian plots against Trump and other former administration officials over the years, including a 2022 scheme targeting former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Trump’s original “obliterate” warning — issued as a deterrent more than a year ago — now reads less like a hypothetical and more like a policy already in motion.
