The chilling campaign to kill Melania Trump

“Death to America” signage has long been part of the macabre tourist trail in Tehran, as I saw for myself during a visit to the Iranian capital more than 20 years ago. In the entrance of the old US embassy, where the 444-day hostage crisis played out, there is a haunting depiction of Lady Liberty, her face replaced with a skull. Not far away, there is a tower-block-sized “Down with America” mural featuring what looks from a distance like the American flag. Get closer up, though, and you see the stars are actually skulls and the stripes look like streaks of blood. Since the start of the Iran war, billboards have featured President Donald Trump lying in an open casket, the US Commander-in-chief as a corpse. Another shows portraits of individual members of the Trump family alongside flag-draped coffins. “Kill Trump” read cardboard placards held aloft during the six-day funeral of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose assassination on 28 February in a joint US-Israeli strike started the conflict. This week a vile video, titled “How to Kill Melania”, was posted by the Tasnim News Agency, an outlet closely associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Using AI-generated imagery, the two-minute film identifies luxury Manhattan fashion stores frequented by the First Lady that would be “suitable for operations by global freedom fighters”. The video uses Melania Trump’s Secret Service codename – which has long been public knowledge – and outlines a number of well-known close protection techniques such as removing curb-side bins from motorcade routes. It ends with an ugly warning: “This is just the beginning. Barron Trump, wait for us.” There is no evidence that assassinating members of the Trump family is state policy for the Iranian regime. This is more likely part of an information-war rather than an operational plot targeting the First Lady and her only child. Maybe it is part of a psy-op (psychological operation) intended to needle the President. One theory is that hardline members of the IRGC are venting their anger and letting off steam ahead of a possible peace deal between Washington and Tehran. Perhaps an Iranian news agency is simply being mischievous. Whatever the motivation, threats against the President and his family are being taken with the utmost seriousness. Earlier this month, when Trump left Ankara at the end of the Nato summit, he was forced to switch planes, from his flashy new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8 to the old 747 previously used as Air Force One. Initially, Trump claimed the new plane had been flown to an airbase in Britain, so that US service members could marvel at the “magnificent” aircraft. Quickly it emerged, however, that the Secret Service had urged the switch because of possible threats from Iran. It was a sensible precaution. The new presidential plane had not yet been fitted with the same anti-missile security devices as the old. Trump has described himself as Tehran’s “number one target,” and claimed: “I’ve been on their list for a long time.” Evidently, he has even war-gamed what should happen in the event of his assassination at the hands of Iran. “I’ve left instructions,” he told the New York Post in mid-July, “to just literally bomb them at levels that they’ve never seen before.” The rhetoric coming out of Tehran is explicitly vengeful. “We pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars from the criminal and disgraced killers,” read a statement put out under the name of new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the previous ayatollah, who has not been seen in public since his father’s assassination. “This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.” This personal, and potentially murderous, animosity towards Trump predates the Iran war, and reaches back to his first term in the White House. Tehran vowed revenge after the President ordered the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani who was killed in a US drone strike on a visit to Baghdad in January 2020. Just after the presidential election in 2024, federal prosecutors brought charges against an Afghan national in connection with a plot to kill Trump during that year’s campaign. Farhad Shakeri, who was not arrested and is believed to be in Iran, was described by the Biden Justice Department as “an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran’s assassination plots against its targets, including president-elect Donald Trump.” A statue symbolising the hand of Iran’s late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, next to a billboard depicting Donald Trump in a coffin, in Tehran (Photo: Majid Asgaripour/Reuters) CNN reported earlier this month that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States which pointed towards a new assassination plot targeting the President. Some US officials, though, suspected this was an attempt by the Netanyahu government to cajole Trump into intensifying the conflict when it looked like it was drawing to an end on highly favourable terms towards Iran. Threats from Tehran even predate the assassination of Soleimani. “’Death to America’ means death to Trump,” proclaimed Khamenei in 2019, ahead of the 40th anniversary of the Islamic revolution. No first lady has ever been assassinated, though Jackie Kennedy was seated next to her husband, John F Kennedy, in the open-topped limousine when he was shot dead in downtown Dallas in November 1963. But, as with all members of the president’s immediate family, wives receive full Secret Service protection. Michelle Obama became the first presidential spouse to have a Counter Assault Team (CAT) regularly assigned to her security detail. CAT teams deploy in black battle dress rather than regular suits, and openly brandish sub-machine guns in what is called the motorcade “muscle car”. History shows that plots against family members can weigh heavily on a president’s mind. Ahead of the Iraq war, president George W Bush referred to Saddam Hussein as “the guy who tried to kill my dad”. This was a reference to a car bomb plot orchestrated by Iraqi intelligence to assassinate then former president George HW Bush during a visit to Kuwait City in April 1993 in revenge for his victory in the first Gulf War. Trump, who has already survived three assassination attempts, often sounds fairly off-hand when talking about the personal threats from Iran. On Truth Social media, the social media platform where he so often vents his fury, he has so far sensibly ignored the latest video nasty out of Iran involving his wife and their 20-year-old son.