President Donald Trump told the New York Post he has left instructions for members of his administration to launch an unprecedented bombing campaign against Iran should the regime succeed in killing him, a blunt warning delivered as Israeli intelligence flagged a new Iranian plot against the president's life.
Trump's remarks, published Friday, came days after mourners at the burial procession for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei displayed a banner reading "WE WILL KILL TRUMP" and chanted calls for his death. The president made clear he views the threat as neither new nor abstract.
The contingency plan, the alleged assassination plot, and the open death threats from Tehran together mark one of the most volatile stretches in the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict, and Trump's response leaves no room for ambiguity about what retaliation would look like.
In his interview with the New York Post, Trump acknowledged being Iran's top target and described the instructions he has put in place in characteristically direct terms.
"I've been on their list for a long time. That's what we're dealing with. The only thing is, I've left instructions, if anything happens, to just literally bomb them at levels that they've never seen before."
He did not identify which administration officials received the instructions or describe the operational specifics. But the message was plainly aimed at Tehran's decision-makers: killing the American president would trigger a response far exceeding anything Iran has faced to date.
Trump also addressed his place on Iran's kill list with the kind of matter-of-fact candor that has defined his public posture on personal threats. As he told the New York Post:
"I've been No. 1 [on Iran's kill list] for a long time, and it's the way life is, you know. I hope you'll miss me."
At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, earlier in the week, Trump struck a similar tone. He described himself as Iran's number-one target and stated the U.S. would win its war with Iran "very quickly."
The president is no stranger to threats against his life. Previous assassination attempts and plots have drawn sustained public attention, including the Butler, Pennsylvania, shooting that prompted congressional investigations into security failures.
Trump's comments arrived against the backdrop of a fresh intelligence warning. CNN reported that Israeli intelligence shared information with the United States about a suspected Iranian plan to assassinate the president. The intelligence reportedly indicated that Iranian officials, including new IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi, were advocating for Trump's killing, as Breitbart reported.
But two unnamed U.S. sources familiar with the matter told reporters the details of the alleged plot were neither clear nor fully vetted by American intelligence. The U.S. had not been independently tracking the plot before Israel raised it. U.S. intelligence found no concrete operational plan, only continued indications of Iranian intent to target the president.
Trump himself appeared to downplay the Israeli intelligence when asked directly. "No, no. Israel came up with nothing. No, no," he said.
That gap, between the Israeli warning and the American assessment, remains one of the open questions in the story. Whether the intelligence reflects an active operational plot or a continuation of long-standing Iranian rhetoric is not publicly settled.
The broader pattern, however, is well established. Iran has targeted Trump since at least 2020, when the U.S. killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. In January 2022, Reuters reported that Iran threatened revenge against Trump if he was not put on trial for ordering the strike. And threats against the president have come from domestic actors as well as foreign ones.
Whatever the intelligence community's assessment of the specific plot, Iran's public posture leaves little to interpret. On July 9, during burial processions for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, regime supporters displayed large banners reading "WE WILL KILL TRUMP" and chanted explicit calls for the president's death, Fox News reported.
The open display was not an aberration. In 2021, Khamenei himself reposted an image on X calling for "vengeance" on Trump, a post characterized at the time as appearing to threaten the president's life, according to the BBC.
These are not the actions of a regime trying to de-escalate. They are the actions of a government that has made killing an American president part of its public brand.
The threats have also drawn renewed scrutiny from Israel, which has shared intelligence on Iranian intentions with Washington at multiple points.
Trump's contingency warning did not arrive in a vacuum. The broader military situation between the United States and Iran has deteriorated sharply.
CBS News reported that Trump said the ceasefire with Iran was over, though the U.S. would continue to negotiate an end to the conflict. Fox News reported that the U.S. had already struck 90 Iranian military targets. Iran, in turn, threatened retaliation and continued to strike ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump vowed to attack Iran if the strikes in the Strait continued. An unnamed source close to the White House captured the administration's posture in plain terms:
"He still wants this thing to be over. But if Iran is shooting at ships, he's not just gonna sit there and do nothing."
Administration advisors reportedly dubbed a planned operation "Operation B**** Slap," the New York Post reported, a name that, whatever its diplomatic polish, signals the administration's appetite for escalation if Iran forces its hand.
The timeline of the past week alone tells the story of a conflict moving fast. On Wednesday, Trump returned from the NATO summit in Turkey and declared the U.S. would win "very quickly." By Friday, he was publicly describing what happens to Iran if its operatives reach him.
Critics will frame Trump's comments as reckless. They will argue that a sitting president publicly describing retaliatory bombing instructions invites escalation and destabilizes diplomacy.
But that argument requires ignoring what Iran has actually done. A regime that parades "WE WILL KILL TRUMP" banners at a state funeral, threatens revenge for years, and strikes commercial shipping lanes is not a regime waiting for a provocation. It is a regime that has already chosen confrontation.
Trump's statement functions as deterrence in its most elemental form: make the cost of action so clear, so public, and so catastrophic that the other side recalculates. Whether Tehran's leadership is rational enough to do that math is the real question, and one that no amount of diplomatic euphemism can resolve.
The fact that threats against the president have come from multiple directions, foreign governments, lone actors facing federal charges, and online provocateurs, makes the security environment around this president unlike anything in modern memory.
Several questions hang over this story. The precise nature of the Israeli intelligence, and whether U.S. agencies have corroborated it, remains unclear. The specific instructions Trump left, and which officials hold them, have not been disclosed. The operational status of the ceasefire, including when it began and what triggered its collapse, has not been fully explained.
And the most consequential question of all: whether Iran views Trump's public warning as a reason to stand down, or as a challenge to answer.
What is not in question is the threat itself. Iran has promised, publicly and repeatedly, to kill an American president. Trump has now promised, just as publicly, what comes next if they try.
When a regime tells you it wants to kill your leader, and your leader tells the regime what happens if it does, that is not escalation. That is clarity. And clarity, in a conflict with a regime that respects nothing else, may be the only language that keeps the peace.