Many will recall that President Donald Trump issued a broad executive order aimed at Iran in February 2025, saying at the time he had left instructions for the country to be “obliterated” if he were ever assassinated. “I’ve left instructions. If they do it, they get obliterated; there won’t be anything left,” Trump said at the signing event.
More than a year on, with the United States engaged in active conflict with Iran, that warning has been met with an explicit retaliatory threat — and Tehran’s long-standing campaign to target Trump has intensified.
On March 10, 2026, amid escalating U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, Iran’s top national security official issued what many analysts described as the most direct public threat against a sitting U.S. president in recent memory. Ali Larijani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and a senior figure in the clerical leadership, 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 warning followed a Truth Social post from Trump declaring Iran would be hit “TWENTY TIMES HARDER” if it disrupted oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Larijani’s statement, issued on behalf of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, also referenced the recent death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Trump downplayed the threat in a CBS News interview, saying he “couldn’t care less.”
After Khamenei was killed on February 28 — the first day of the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran — Larijani had also publicly vowed on television to hold Trump personally accountable for the supreme leader’s death.
While Iran issued new threats, U.S. forces were simultaneously dismantling networks Iran had allegedly used to target Trump. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the leader of the Iranian unit behind a previous assassination attempt on Trump was killed during U.S. military strikes, stating, “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”
On March 2, Trump addressed the killing directly: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first,” linking the attempted assassinations to the wider U.S. operations against Iranian leaders.
Hegseth did not identify the individual by name, but Israeli reporter Amit Segal named him on X as Rahman Mokadam, who is reported to head the IRGC’s special operations division.
The public threat from Larijani arrived days after a significant legal development in the U.S. Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national allegedly trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was convicted in connection with a conspiracy to assassinate Trump. U.S. national security officials had warned the Trump campaign that Iran was actively targeting him and that several suspected operatives were believed to be inside the United States.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi commented on 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 the first Iranian attempt to harm Americans on U.S. soil.
Court documents revealed the scope of Iran’s reach. An undercover video shown in a Brooklyn courtroom featured an alleged Iran-linked operative describing the 2024 plot, placing a vape pen on a napkin to represent his target and asking: “This is the target. How will it die?”
The threats toward Trump go back to January 2020, when Trump ordered the drone strike in Baghdad that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force. Iranian leaders have repeatedly vowed revenge for Soleimani’s death and have identified Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as targets.
Trump’s security team has treated those threats seriously for years. After a second assassination attempt on Trump in Florida in 2024 — unrelated to Iran — his protection detail was so concerned about the Iran threat that he traveled to an event aboard a decoy plane owned by Steve Witkoff.
The Justice Department has documented several alleged Iranian plots against Trump and other former officials over time, including a 2022 plan targeting former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
Trump’s earlier “obliterate” warning — offered as a deterrent more than a year ago — now appears less hypothetical and more like a policy already unfolding.
