Against the backdrop of stunning developments in the Middle East, the world held its breath as President Trump, overriding the naysayers and prophets of doom, executed a brilliant operation against Iran’s core nuclear sites last week that ended the Iranian nuclear threat for the foreseeable future.
The sheer scale, audacity, and devastating precision of the stealth-bomber strikes set President Trump apart from all his predecessors in confronting Iran’s ayatollahs. This bold show of strength paved the way for him to broker a historic ceasefire between Iran and Israel just days later.
While this riveting chain of events has dominated the news cycle —a unique component of the saga has been largely overlooked or underreported by most media.
That is the element of great personal danger that Trump has consistently risked —in the months leading up to his first presidential term until today— from a devilish regime that has relentlessly sought to kill him with one assassination plot after another.
“The Iranian regime has been trying to murder President Trump and other American officials for years,” attested Sen. Ted Cruz in a news interview and on an online post. “It’s a fact, not a theory. And yet, there are people [in the U.S. government] who don’t want to act against the Ayatollah – and so they deny proven assassination threats.”
Over the decades, Tehran has orchestrated countless attacks and atrocities against American citizens and military personnel around the world.
But in recent years, its terror strategy has evolved: rather than relying solely on indiscriminate violence, the regime has turned to targeted assassinations, hiring contract killers to eliminate individuals it views as direct threats.
Chief among those targets was Donald Trump who infuriated the ayatollahs by undoing all of Obama’s policies that pandered to them.
Trump’s first administration ended Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, re-imposed sanctions and ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a senior terrorist leader responsible for carrying out some of the worst atrocities against Israel and U.S. forces in the region.
Iranian-backed plots to kill Donald Trump came to light shortly after the 2024 election. Though less known to the public than the high-profile assassination attempts last summer in Butler, Pennsylvania and in West Palm Beach, Fla, these schemes were well-documented and ultimately exposed and thwarted.
Hunted by Tehran
Politico reported last July that the U.S. intelligence community had collected increasing evidence suggesting Iran was actively working on plots to kill Trump.
“U.S. officials are coming to a troubling realization about Iran’s repeated threats to kill Donald Trump and some of his former top generals and national security strategists: Tehran isn’t bluffing — and it isn’t giving up anytime soon,” the article said.
Around the same time, a 46-year-old Pakistani national named Asif Merchant was arrested in Texas. He was charged with seeking, under instructions from Iranian officials, to kill high-ranking U.S. politicians or officials—particularly Trump—viewed as adversarial to the Iranian regime.
Then FBI Director Chris Wray said in August 2024 that “this dangerous murder-for-hire plot exposed in today’s charges was allegedly orchestrated by a Pakistani national with close ties to Iran and is straight out of the Iranian playbook.”
Law enforcement agents placed Merchant under arrest before he could leave the country. Then-candidate Trump was briefed by American intelligence officials about “real and specific” threats against him from Iran in September of 2024.
Then, in Nov. 2024, federal prosecutors charged an Iran-based citizen, Farhad Shakeri, of plotting to kill president-elect Donald Trump—allegedly hired by the Islamic Republic’s military.
According to AP News, investigators said Shakeri spent time in American prisons for robbery and maintains a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots.
According to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan, Shakeri said he had been tasked by an Iranian government official with planning Trump’s assassination prior to the November 2024 presidential election. “We have already spent a lot of money, money’s not an issue,” Shakeri claims he was told.
The would-be assassin told the FBI that his contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan “within seven days” to surveil and ultimately kill Trump.
Shakeri told investigators the official told advised him that if he could not put together a plan within the seven-day timeframe, the plot would be paused until after the election. The reason is that Iranian officials assumed Trump would lose at which point, no longer entitled to a special security detail, it would be easier to kill him, the complaint said.
“The charges announced today expose Iran’s continued brazen attempts to target American citizens, including President-elect Donald Trump, other government leaders and dissidents who criticize the regime in Tehran,” said former FBI Director Wray.
In another plot, the DOJ alleged Shakeri had been tasked by Iranian officials with surveilling two Jewish-American citizens in New York, and had been offered $760,000 to murder either of them. Prosecutors also say he had been ordered to kill Israeli tourists in Sri Lanka.
Shakeri ultimately eluded arrest and remains at large, likely living in Tehran, according to the DOJ.
Peace Through Strength
Judging by the shameful record of appeasement and inaction by past U.S. presidents toward Iran, the wave of assassination plots targeting Trump and other Americans—both domestically and overseas—might have persuaded Trump to bow out of the presidential race.
Political pundits speculated in the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election about whether the repeated attempts on his life—and the law of odds dictating that he wouldn’t survive all of them—would lead Trump to withdraw his candidacy.
Yet, instead of making him fearful, these assassination plots apparently brought out the warrior in him.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung put an end to all speculation in November 2024. The president-elect, he said, was aware of the recently uncovered Iranian death plots but was determined that nothing would stop him “from returning to the White House and restoring peace around the world.”
That resolute mindset has driven the Trump administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East—which is essentially to project American strength when the moment calls for it, strengthen geopolitical relations, and expose the dangers of appeasement.
Encapsulated as “peace through strength,” and showcased by the powerful stealth-bomber strikes against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure last week, Trump’s doctrine has not only reshaped the regional balance of power, it has also guided Trump’s strong alliance with Israel and his hardline negotiations with Tehran—including the ultimatum that Iran must never acquire nuclear weapons, a warning the terrorist regime dismissed as bluster until it was too late.
In a worrisome development, the WSJ reported that Iran’s stores of enriched uranium were not fully obliterated along with the fortified underground nuclear facilities, due to supplies having been whisked away to a different location ahead of the strikes.
However, according to Vice President Vance in an ABC News interview this week, “Iran no longer has the ability to rapidly weaponize the fuel. And that was really the goal here.”
Iran ‘Retaliates’
Two days after the U.S. strikes against Iran’s nuclear sites came the sudden news that Iran had retaliated against American bases in the Persian Gulf.
“Iran launched missile attacks Monday on a U.S. military bases in Qatar and Iraq, retaliating for the American bombing of its nuclear sites and escalating tensions in the volatile region,” the Jerusalem Post reported.
Iran boasted on state television that it attacked American forces stationed at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base, posting a caption on screen that called it “a mighty and successful response” to “America’s aggression” as martial music played.
Iran said it also targeted the Ain al-Assad base housing U.S. troops in western Iraq, an Iraqi security official told The Associated Press.
Initially, the announcement seemed to vindicate those who repeatedly warned that Trump was dragging the United States into a forever war that would ruin the country.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and his echo chamber have been parroting these doomsday predictions for months. In March, Carlson railed against a future U.S. strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, promising it would unleash catastrophe.
“It will almost certainly result in thousands of American deaths at bases throughout the Middle East and cost the United States tens of billions of dollars,” Carlson preached. “A bombing campaign will set off a war—and it will be America’s war. Don’t let the propagandists lie to you.”
The irony, of course, is that Carlson is the one peddling propaganda. None of his panicky predictions materialized and Iran’s bombings barely qualify as “retaliation.”
Not only did Tehran forewarn the United States of its intended attacks, enabling military officials to move aircraft and personnel out of harm’s way, but the attacks fell on buildings or in open spaces. No casualties or injuries to Americans were reported.
Reeling From Israeli Strikes
In reality, Iran’s retaliation was little more than a feeble face-saving gesture, exposing the regime’s vulnerability as its political and military infrastructure reels from Israeli strikes.
With control of Middle Eastern airspace, Israeli jets have been hammering IRGC headquarters in Tehran and delivering devastating blows to other key pillars of the regime.
Less than 24 hours after Tehran’s “retaliation” against American bases later came the White House announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, brokered by President Trump. The president posted on his Truth Social platform that “Israel and Iran have agreed to a 12-hour ceasefire, starting at 7:00 a.m. Israel time on Tuesday morning.”
He added that “Iran will be the first to stop hostilities, beginning in six hours, and Israel will do the same six hours later.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson praised President Trump for “a really remarkable achievement.”
“President Trump deserves all the credit. This is what peace through strength looks like. We haven’t seen this in a while, and it’s really a big sigh of relief here on Capitol Hill,” Johnson told reporters, as quoted by CNN.
Calling it “a really, really big day,” and “historic,” Johnson also said that calls from other lawmakers for a “War Powers” resolution limiting the president’s authority to issue further strikes on Iran was no longer relevant.
Iran still possesses hundreds of ballistic missiles and minutes before the ceasefire was supposed to take effect, the regime was launching missile barrages at Israeli population centers, scoring a direct hit on an apartment building in Beer Sheva.
Whether the ceasefire with Israel will hold remains to be seen.
“Whatever happens next, Trump ensured that the world would not be forced to confront a nuclear Iran,” wrote JNS editor Jonathan Tobin. “Friends of Israel and those who want the West to defend itself against the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, should be silently uttering a prayer of gratitude for what Trump has done.”
History of Aggression Against Americans
Those who challenged President Trump’s decision to strike Iran’s nuclear sites might want to turn back the pages of recent history to revisit Iran’s grim history of crimes against the West, Americans particularly.
From the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, when 52 American diplomats and citizens were held captive for 444 days, to a series of deadly terrorist attacks orchestrated by Iranian-backed groups, Iran orchestrated some of the most violent events in modern American history.
The Islamic Republic of Iran established itself as an arch foe of the United States ever since it seized power in 1979. Radical Iranian students and operatives backed by the regime took dozens of American embassy workers hostage in 1979 and held them for 444 days.
In 1983, Iranian-backed terrorists bombed the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. service members. The regime was also behind the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia which killed 19 U.S. Air Force personnel.
Iran and its IRGC played a key role in fueling the deadly insurgency in Iraq after the U.S. invaded in 2003.
The IRGC along with its Quds Force, supports terrorists elsewhere in the world. The terrorist organization guides Iran’s global proxies, carries out cyberattacks and assassinations, funds missile development, and wields huge influence both inside the country and around the region.
According to the Defense Department, quoted in the Washington Examiner in 2019, Iran was responsible for “at least 603” U.S. service member deaths in the Middle East, and that “the casualties were the result of a wide array of explosives devices, rockets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, small-arms, sniper, and other attacks in Iraq.”
Iran-trained terrorists murdered five U.S. soldiers in 2007; and more recent attacks have continued this deadly pattern.
A 2020 rocket attack on Camp Taji, Iraq, attributed to Iran-backed militias, killed two U.S. soldiers. A 2023 drone strike on a Syrian Coalition Base, killed an American contractor; and a 2024 drone attack in Jordan killed three American soldiers.
The Hamas terrorists involved in the atrocities of October 7 in Israel were funded by Iran and received training from the IRGC. Eventually, Iranian proxies launched assaults against Israel on seven fronts, laying bare the depravity of a regime obsessed with genocidal hatred and sowing death and chaos.
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The Return to ‘Maximum Pressure’
One of the lynchpins of President Trump’s Middle East foreign policy going back to his first term in office has been his unwavering position that Iran cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. He has never deviated from that stance.
The U.S. entered the disastrous nuclear deal with the Iranian regime under the Obama administration in 2015.
Iran received an influx of billions in taxpayers’ cash as a result of the deal, including a jet carrying $400 million in euros and Swiss francs; another $1.3 billion in cash; the release of up to $150 billion in frozen Iranian assets, and the lifting of international sanctions, according to CNN.
Critics decried the lifting of sanctions and lavish benefits, saying they enabled Iran to resume its financing of global terror and destabilization of the Middle East.
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran deal in May 2018, saying, “The so-called ‘Iran deal’ was supposed to protect the United States and our allies from the lunacy of an Iranian nuclear bomb … In fact, the deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and, over time, reach the brink of a nuclear breakout.”
Trump called it “defective at its core.”
Applying “Maximum Pressure” on Tehran through economic sanctions was integral to his administration’s policy in his first term as president, and Trump immediately reinstated it through an executive order upon his return to office.
The directive among other things, orders the U.S. Treasury secretary to impose “maximum economic pressure” on Iran, including sanctions and enforcement mechanisms.
It also directs the Treasury and State Department to implement a campaign aimed at “driving Iran’s oil exports to zero in order to stop Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
As he signed the memo, Trump described it as “very tough” on Iran and said he was “torn” on whether to make the move. He said he was open to a deal with Iran’s leader and expressed a willingness to talk to him.
“With me, it’s very simple: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. Asked by a reporter how close Tehran is to a weapon, Trump said: “They’re too close.”
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He Wasn’t Bluffing; The Ayatollahs Understand That Now
In an appearance on ABC News, Senator Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, responded to his host’s question about whether US airstrikes that demolished Iran’s nuclear sites might provoke Iran’s retaliation.
“President Trump was very clear in his warning to Iran that last night’s [military strikes on its nuclear sites] was child’s play if Iran targets Americans,” Sen. Cotton said. Clearly, he means business, and the ayatollohs understand that now. He wasn’t bluffing. He does not bluff. There are still numerous targets in Iran that the regime holds very dear. They should not target Americans.”
“And if they choose to do so?” the ABC News host asked.
“That is up to Iran. They would do well to bear in mind some recent history,” Sen. Cotton said, citing Present Trump’s assassination of Iranian master terrorist Qassem Soleimani, a demonstration of deadly strength that critics predicted would trigger a military escalation on Iran’s part but did not.
Trump chose to target Soleimani after the violent storming of the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in late December 2019,
“In retaliation, Iran bombed one of our military bases in the region, but they telegraphed they were going to attack, enabling precautions to be taken. There were some injuries but no Americans died,” Cotton recounted.
[Ironically, almost the exact same half-hearted “Iranian retaliation” scenario was replayed this week, two days after the U.S. strikes.]
“My message to the Supreme Leader Khamanei is, look at the lessons of history,” Sen. Cotton said. “Do not tempt fate, do not target Americans, heed Donald Trump’s warning.”
