US President Donald Trump’s disclosure that he has left “instructions” for a devastating bombing campaign against Iran if he is assassinated marks an extraordinary public turn in a threat assessment that has been building for months, one shaped by fresh Israeli intelligence, a hastily swapped Air Force One, and scenes from Tehran of mourners chanting for the American president’s death at the funeral of the Islamic Republic’s slain supreme leader.
“I’ve been on their list for a long time. That’s what we’re dealing with,” Trump told the New York Post’s Caitlin Doornbos in a phone interview published Friday. “The only thing is, I’ve left instructions, if anything happens, to just literally bomb them at levels that they’ve never seen before.” Asked directly whether he was worried about his safety, Trump added, with characteristic bravado, “I hope you’ll miss me.”
The remarks did not emerge in a vacuum. They followed days of mounting tension between Washington and Tehran, a collapsing ceasefire, and a Wall Street Journal report that Israeli intelligence officials had warned the United States of a newly developed Iranian plot to kill the president, a warning Trump, in the same interview, flatly dismissed.
A Warning Trump Waves Away — Then Half-Confirms
Pressed on the Journal’s reporting, Trump denied that Israel had passed along anything new. “No, no. Israel came up with nothing. No, no,” he told the Post. “I’ve been No. 1 on Iran’s kill list for a long time, and it’s the way life is.” The denial, however, sat awkwardly alongside Trump’s own acknowledgement days earlier, at the NATO summit in Ankara, that he had “seen” himself named at the very top of Iran’s target list, a comment that left open whether he was referring to older, general threat assessments or the specific new intelligence Israel had reportedly shared.
The picture inside the US government was similarly muddled, according to CNN. Two sources familiar with the matter told the network that American intelligence agencies have long tracked a “steady drumbeat” of chatter about potential plots against Trump, but that the specific warning relayed by Israel this week was new and unusually precise.
Crucially, though, those same sources cautioned that US agencies had not independently verified the Israeli report and had not previously been tracking the alleged plot themselves, a gap that fed suspicion in Washington that the warning may have served a second purpose.
A Convenient Warning? Suspicion of an Israeli Motive
Multiple American officials, speaking to American broadcasters, floated the possibility that Israel’s intelligence-sharing was intended less as a pure security alert and more as an effort to shape Trump’s calculus at a pivotal moment, as he weighs whether to escalate US military action against Iran further. That scepticism was echoed publicly by Washington state Democratic Representative Adam Smith, who told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins it was plausible Israel might want to “buck up” Trump’s resolve to confront Tehran more forcefully, while acknowledging Iran’s own history of vowing revenge made any warning impossible to fully dismiss.
Israeli officials cited by Channel 12 offered yet another interpretation, telling the network the intelligence reflected general internal Iranian discussion about targeting Trump rather than a concrete, actionable plot, and suggesting the disclosure may have partly served to smooth over recently strained relations between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose views on how aggressively to pursue the war have increasingly diverged from the American president’s.
The Backdrop: Khamenei’s Killing and a Funeral of Fury
The renewed threat assessment cannot be separated from the singular event that transformed Iran’s grievance against Trump earlier this year: the killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the joint US-Israeli strikes that opened the war on February 28. Khamenei’s dayslong funeral procession concluded this past week with a burial in Mashhad, drawing grief-stricken, furious crowds across multiple Iranian cities and into neighbouring Iraq.
Banners reading “We Will Kill Trump” were held aloft at the ceremonies, and mourners in Mashhad were reported chanting, “By the blood of the supreme leader, Trump, we will kill you.”
Iran’s threats toward Trump, however, run deeper than Khamenei’s death alone, tracing back to the January 2020 drone strike Trump ordered during his first term that killed Qassem Soleimani, the powerful commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force.
US prosecutors announced charges in 2024 tied to an alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Trump and a prominent Iranian-American dissident journalist, part of a pattern of disrupted plots federal authorities say has continued in the years since Soleimani’s killing.
The Jet Swap That Fueled Speculation
The threat assessment’s most visible real-world consequence came during Trump’s return from the NATO summit in Ankara, when he unexpectedly departed Turkiye aboard an older Air Force One rather than the newly unveiled, Qatari-gifted jet that had carried him there, the aircraft’s first international flight. Trump publicly denied the switch was security-related, but the New York Times reported that the US Secret Service had recommended the change as a precaution, according to unnamed sources briefed on the matter, even though the same sources said the swap was not prompted by any specific, concrete threat.
The optics were nonetheless striking: a brand-new $400 million presidential aircraft, sidelined on its maiden overseas voyage, even as the country it was flying near, Turkey, shares a border with Iran.
A Ceasefire in Name Only
The assassination warnings have surfaced against the backdrop of a rapidly deteriorating truce. Trump declared earlier in the week that the roughly two-month ceasefire ending the US-Iran war was “over,” after accusing Tehran of orchestrating strikes on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and on neighbouring Gulf states.
Yet even as Trump publicly wrote off the agreement, the White House sought to preserve some diplomatic runway.
“The United States is still committed to finding a resolution, and technical talks continue,” a senior US official said in a statement to reporters, while affirming that Iran’s attacks on shipping vessels amounted to “acts of terrorism.”
That contradiction, a president declaring the ceasefire dead while his own administration insists talks remain alive, mirrors the broader ambiguity running through the assassination story itself: real, longstanding Iranian hostility toward Trump, layered with fresh, unverified, and possibly strategically timed intelligence, arriving at a moment when the American president is being asked, publicly and repeatedly, how far he is willing to go if Tehran ever succeeds.
What Happens if the Unthinkable Occurs
Trump’s account of “standing instructions” for a retaliatory bombing campaign raises a question with no true precedent in American history: what legal and command authority would actually govern such a scenario.
Constitutionally, responsibility for any military response would fall to US Vice President JD Vance the moment he assumed the powers of the presidency, regardless of any informal instructions Trump says he has left behind.
Whether Trump’s disclosure reflects genuine contingency planning, a deliberate signal meant to deter Tehran, or simply the blunt, improvisational rhetoric that has defined his public statements throughout the Iran conflict, the remark now stands as one of the most explicit warnings of retaliatory force a sitting American president has ever offered in the event of his own death.
