Trump says Iran would be ‘obliterated’ if it assassinated him – National

U.S. President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s given his advisers instructions to obliterate Iran if it assassinates him.

“If they did that they would be obliterated,” Trump said in an exchange with reporters while signing what he called a “tough” presidential memorandum calling for the U.S. government to impose maximum pressure on Tehran.

“I’ve left instructions if they do it, they get obliterated, there won’t be anything left.”

Federal authorities have been tracking Iranian threats against Trump and other administration officials for years. Trump ordered the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, who led the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.

A threat on Trump’s life from Iran prompted additional security in the days before a July campaign rally in Pennsylvania where Trump was shot in the ear, according to U.S. officials. But officials at the time said they did not believe Iran was connected to that assassination attempt.

The Justice Department announced in November that an Iranian plot to kill Trump before the presidential election had been thwarted.

The department alleged Iranian officials had instructed Farhad Shakeri, 51, in September to focus on surveilling and ultimately assassinating Trump. Shakeri is still at large in Iran.

Iranian officials, at the time, dismissed the allegation, with foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei calling the report a plot by Israel-linked circles to make Iran-U.S. relations more complicated.

Investigators were told of the plan to kill Trump by Shakeri, an accused Iranian government asset who spent time in American prisons for robbery and who authorities say maintained a network of criminal associates enlisted by Tehran for surveillance and murder-for-hire plots, according to the complaint.

Shakeri, an Afghan national living in Iran, told the FBI that a contact in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard instructed him last September to set aside other work he was doing and assemble a plan within seven days to surveil and ultimately kill Trump, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Manhattan.

Trump recently revoked government security protection for former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his top aide, Brian Hook, as well as his former national security adviser John Bolton, who have all faced threats from Iran after they took hardline stances against the Islamic Republic during Trump’s first administration.

The comments came ahead of a White House meeting between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.

Trump said while signing the memo he would be willing to meet with his Iranian counterpart to try to persuade Iran to give up what the United States believes are Tehran’s efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.

Trump also said Iran is too close to having a nuclear weapon and that the United States has the right to block the sale of Iranian oil to other nations.

Trump has accused former president Joe Biden of failing to rigorously enforce oil-export sanctions, which Trump says emboldened Tehran by allowing it to sell oil to fund a nuclear weapons program and armed militias in the Middle East.

Iran is “dramatically” accelerating enrichment of uranium to up to 60% purity, close to the roughly 90% weapons-grade level, the U.N. nuclear watchdog chief told Reuters in December. Iran has denied wanting to develop a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s memo, among other things, orders the U.S. Treasury secretary to impose “maximum economic pressure” on Iran, including sanctions and enforcement mechanisms on those violating existing sanctions.

It also directs the Treasury and State Department to implement a campaign aimed at “driving Iran’s oil exports to zero.”U.S. oil prices pared losses on Tuesday on the news that Trump planned to sign the memo, which offset some weakness from the tariff drama between Washington and Beijing O/R.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tehran’s oil exports brought in $53 billion in 2023 and $54 billion a year earlier, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates. Output during 2024 was running at its highest level since 2018, based on OPEC data.

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Trump had driven Iran’s oil exports to near-zero during part of his first term after re-imposing sanctions. They rose under Biden’s tenure as Iran succeeded in evading sanctions.

The Paris-based International Energy Agency believes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other OPEC members have spare capacity to make up for any lost exports from Iran, also an OPEC member.

China does not recognize U.S. sanctions and Chinese firms buy the most Iranian oil. China and Iran have also built a trading system that uses mostly Chinese yuan and a network of middlemen, avoiding the dollar and exposure to U.S. regulators.

Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy, said the Trump administration could enforce the 2024 Stop Harboring Iranian Petroleum (SHIP) law to curtail some Iranian barrels.

SHIP, which the Biden administration did not enforce strictly, allows measures on foreign ports and refineries that process petroleum exported from Iran in violation of sanctions. Book said a move last month by the Shandong Port Group to ban U.S.-sanctioned tankers from calling into its ports in the eastern Chinese province signals the impact SHIP could have.

Trump also directed his U.N. ambassador to work with allies to “complete the snapback of international sanctions and restrictions on Iran,” under a 2015 deal between Iran and key world powers that lifted sanctions on Tehran in return for restrictions on its nuclear program.

The U.S. quit the agreement in 2018, during Trump’s first term, and Iran began moving away from its nuclear-related commitments under the deal. The Trump administration had also tried to trigger a snapback of sanctions under the deal in 2020, but the move was dismissed by the U.N. Security Council.

Britain, France and Germany told the United Nations Security Council in December that they are ready – if necessary – to trigger a snapback of all international sanctions on Iran to prevent the country from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

They will lose the ability to take such action on Oct. 18 when a 2015 U.N. resolution expires. The resolution enshrines Iran’s deal with Britain, Germany, France, the United States, Russia and China that lifted sanctions on Tehran in exchange for restrictions on its nuclear program.

Iran’s U.N. ambassador, Amir Saeid Iravani, has said that invoking the “snap-back” of sanctions on Tehran would be “unlawful and counterproductive.”

European and Iranian diplomats met in November and January to discuss if they could work to defuse regional tensions, including over Tehran’s nuclear program, before Trump returned.

—With additional files from Reuters