President Donald Trump on Feb. 13 at the White House.
United States President Donald Trump for the first time acknowledged a personal dimension to his decision to attack Iran, citing the country’s efforts to assassinate him in 2024 as a factor in ordering the joint US-Israeli operation that killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“I got him before he got me,” Trump said in an interview with ABC News. “I got him first.”
Trump had not previously addressed how the Iranian threats to his life coloured his thinking on taking the US to war in the Middle East.
Those threats, on top of the assassination attempts in July and September 2024, dominated his and his advisers’ experience of the autumn 2024 campaign, with repeated security scares and emergency measures such as changing planes and motorcade routes.
The Iranian desire to kill Trump dates back to the US airstrike that killed General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.
Federal prosecutors have charged two cases of alleged Iranian murder-for-hire schemes. No evidence has connected Iran with the two assassination attempts against Trump in 2024.
Trump suggested he sees a connection, telling ABC: “They tried twice”.
The White House did not provide evidence to support a connection.
“There are a million reasons to eliminate terrorists like Ayatollah Khamenei,” a senior Administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “His plots to assassinate President Trump are just one reason.”
Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, portrayed Iran’s interest in killing Trump as part of a pattern of behaviour that justified the US attack.
“It is responsible for a series of unprovoked armed attacks against the US and Israel, violations of the UN charter, and threats to international peace and security across the Middle East,” Waltz said last weekend at an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council. “It has even attempted to assassinate the US president, President Trump.”
National security officials warned Trump’s campaign that Iran wanted to kill him - before he was injured at a July 13, 2024, rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The shooter, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was killed at the scene, and investigators have not established a clear motive.
At a briefing on the threats in September 2024, US officials told the Trump campaign that Iran had multiple kill teams inside the country.
Trump repeatedly asked whether Iran was behind the Butler shooting, and investigators said they could not rule it out, according to people familiar with the briefing.
The would-be assassin at Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, 59-year-old Ryan Wesley Routh, represented himself at trial and was sentenced last month to life in prison.
A trial began last week for a Pakistani man, Asif Merchant, arrested in July 2024 and accused of trying to hire hit men to kill a political figure.
Last month, a Brooklyn man was sentenced to 15 years in prison for planning to murder an Iranian dissident, working for an Iranian who prosecutors said was plotting to assassinate Trump.
Iranian officials publicly vowed revenge against American leaders, including Trump and former advisers Mike Pompeo and John Bolton.
The Government continued providing security details for Pompeo and Bolton throughout the Biden administration, until Trump withdrew them.
Trump and his Administration have not extensively presented a public case for the attack on Iran.
The subject occupied three of 108 minutes of his State of the Union address last week, and he released two videos over the weekend and spoke on the subject for about six minutes yesterday without taking questions.
On Tuesday Trump listed four objectives: destroying Iran’s missile capabilities, Navy, nuclear ambitions and ability to sponsor terrorism.
In earlier remarks, he spoke more broadly of overthrowing the regime and freeing the Iranian people.
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