Donald Trump thinks Iran is trying to kill him: Why the former president thinks Iranians are out to get him

Former President Donald Trump has been the target of at least two assassination attempts this summer and on Wednesday said at a campaign event that Iran may have been behind other recent attempts to kill him. Those remarks came a day after US intelligence officials briefed him on what his campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said were “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him.”

The Associated Press reports that officials at the briefing said it was focused on threats that had been previously reported and not any new plot or plots. The former president and Republican candidate in the 2024 election had his Secret Service detail beefed up following information about an Iranian threat to his life in July.

However, there is no intelligence which connects either of the two actual attempts, one in Pennsylvania in July and another in Florida this month, with those intelligence officials briefed him on related to Iran.

Donald Trump thinks Iran is trying to kill him

In a post on social media on Wednesday, Trump said that there were “Big threats on my life by Iran.” He added, “Moves were already made by Iran that didn’t work out, but they will try again. Not a good situation for anyone.”

He then talked about the heightened level of security surrounding him and thanked Congress for approving extra funds for the Secret Service. “Thank you to Congress for unanimously approving far more money to Secret Service - Zero ‘NO’ Votes, strictly bipartisan. Nice to see Republicans and Democrats get together on something,” he wrote.

It was passed as part of a stopgap bill to keep the government funded that he had just days before told Republicans not to vote for unless it included a controversial non-citizen voting bill. House Speaker dropped that from the continuing resolution to ensure that there wasn’t a government shutdown just weeks before the November 5 election.

Why the former president thinks Iranians are out to get him

Cheung in a statement said that the Iranian assassination threats were made “in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” The Trump campaign has tried to make politic hay out of the Iranian threats to attack his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.  It wants to portray her as weak on foreign policy and national defense.

Authorities charged a Pakistani man with alleged ties to the Iranian government in August. He is accused of traveling to the United States and trying to recruit people for a plot to assassinate political figures here in the US. While not named, legal filings by law enforcement suggest that Trump may have been a potential target.

The US government has also accused Iran of trying to interfere in the 2024 election in other ways. Authorities said that Iranian hackers sent emails containing excerpts of stolen material from Trump’s campaign unsolicited to people affiliated with President Joe Biden’s then re-election campaign. They reportedly never responded to emails and a campaign official told CNN that the material received “was never used.”