Iran's Trump Strategy -- Dead or Alive

 

 

“President Trump likely knows something about catering, but we doubt he ever thought he'd be smuggled off an airplane in a catering container to avoid an Iranian threat on his life. Yet that's what happened in July, officials now say. Mr. Trump flew out of Turkey secretly on a military jet and then was returned to the original Air Force One after landing. The reporters aboard never knew he was gone.

 

The press corps, which had been left on the decoy Presidential plane, understandably is up in arms.

 

But the real story is the seriousness of Iran's efforts to kill the President. These attempts are longstanding and help explain why the U.S. is fighting.

 

The regime doesn't hide its intentions. It puts up billboards and murals around Tehran of Mr. Trump lying in a coffin or drowning in a sea of blood. The regime's clerics brand Mr. Trump with labels that demand violence under Shiite Islamic jurisprudence: "one who wars against God," "one whose blood must be spilled," "corruptor of the earth" and "warring infidel." At times Iran's regime has put a bounty on his head.

 

Two Grand Ayatollahs issued a fatwa against Mr. Trump reminiscent of the one against Salman Rushdie, which has followed the writer since the 1980s. He was stabbed nearly to death as a result in 2022. If the regime survives past 2028, it will follow Mr. Trump as well. Thankfully, so will the Secret Service.

 

As the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once put it, "'Death to America' means death to Trump." Only when Iran's regime was speaking to useful idiot Tucker Carlson in 2025 did President Masoud Pezeshkian hilariously claim, without challenge, that "death to America" really means "death to killing" -- i.e., peace.

 

That would be news to federal law enforcement, which has broken up several murder-for-hire plots by Iran's Revolutionary Guard to target Mr. Trump. In March a federal jury convicted a Pakistani national on such charges. He admitted being sent by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for the purpose.

 

Iranian threats hounded Mr. Trump on the campaign trail in 2024. The regime knew that the man who ordered the strike on IRGC Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and who led the maximum-pressure sanctions campaign, was Enemy No. 1.

 

It also knew that his successors, like his predecessors, were far less likely to take action against its nuclear program.

 

For all the talk of how this war has "helped" Iran's regime, it's no accident that its state media and approved experts stress the need to use the Strait of Hormuz to hurt Mr. Trump in the November elections. The regime is desperate to run out the clock on the Trump Presidency -- or speed up that clock with deadly violence.” [1]

 

1. Iran's Trump Strategy -- Dead or Alive. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 12 Aug 2026: A14.