Donald Trump has a flair for the dramatic, especially in the heat of a political campaign. But the former president faces what U.S. officials say is an “active threat” of assassination from Iran, and he needs to help an overstretched Secret Service protect him from what could be personal and national disaster.
The danger is real and immediate. Trump is heading Saturday to Butler, Pa., for an emotional replay of the rally at which he was nearly killed in July by Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old would-be assassin. It will be great campaign theater, but for a presidential candidate under threat, it’s an unwise and perhaps irresponsible decision.
Trump is promoting his appearance like it’s a wrestling rematch. “I’m going back to Butler because I feel I have an obligation to go back to Butler. We never finished what we were supposed to do,” he said this week in an interview with NewsNation. “I’m fulfilling a promise. I’m fulfilling, really, an obligation.” U.S. officials worry that visiting the site again could attract copycat assassins — in addition to the ongoing Iranian threat.
Trump has a special obligation to protect himself at an explosive time in the Middle East. If something happened, God forbid, in Butler or any other stop on the campaign trail over the next month — and it had any link with the Iranian threat stream — there would be an intense public demand for a decisive U.S. response. That’s how wars begin. Remember the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, which began a chain of events that sparked World War I.
The Secret Service, which badly botched its operations during Trump’s near-fatal appearance in Butler in July, will have an overwhelming presence this time. Scores of agents have been involved in the protection operation. The service will install Conex metal barriers to block line-of-sight shots toward Trump or his vice-presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance, who is expected to also be in Butler. The skies overhead will be protected by anti-drone systems.
Trump was briefed on Sept. 24 about the Iranian danger by a representative of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The Trump campaign said after that session that he was told about “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” The Trump campaign statement said Trump had been warned that the Iranian threats have “heightened in the past few months.”
Trump later posted on his Truth Social site that Iran had made “big threats” on his life and that “they will try again.” According to U.S. officials, Iran is targeting Trump as retaliation for his decision as president to kill Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in January 2020. Other U.S. officials involved in that operation have also been threatened.
Despite the briefing, Trump decided four days later to attend a college-football game in Tuscaloosa, Ala. That decision placed a huge burden on the Secret Service, many of whose agents had just finished a grueling week protecting U.S. and foreign leaders at the annual gathering of the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
To shield Trump at the game, the Secret Service had to screen about 100,000 fans with magnetometers, according to knowledgeable officials. Hundreds of Secret Service agents were dispatched to the game, the officials said, along with hundreds of agents drafted from the Transportation Security Administration. Trump got to wave at the big crowd, but the cost of protecting him was huge.
Trump’s response was to attack the Secret Service. In a post this week on Truth Social, he claimed, “The Democrats are interfering with my Campaign by not giving us the proper number of people within Secret Service that are necessary for Security.” He said the president of Iran “is doing everything possible to kill me” and that, “We need more Secret Service and we need them NOW.”
Concerns from Trump about the Iranian threat is accurate — which makes his decision to campaign in difficult to secure settings all the more reckless. Iran released a propaganda video showing a mock drone attack targeting Trump on a golf course. A computer message flashes on the video: “Soleimani’s murderer and the one who gave the order will pay the price.”
One Iranian plot has already been disrupted. The Justice Department on Aug. 6 indicted a Pakistani man named Asif Raza Merchant who had visited Iran. Prosecutors charged that he had “orchestrated a plot to assassinate a politician or U.S. government official on U.S. soil.” The arrest warrant noted that Iran has “publicly stated the desire to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani,” and cited an unsuccessful plot disclosed a year before to kill a “former U.S. national security adviser,” probably Trump’s one-time aide, John Bolton.
Given the Iranian threats, the Secret Service was vexed by Trump’s decision to play golf at the Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Fla. on Sept. 16. Another would-be assassin, Ryan Wesley Routh, was waiting for him near one of the course’s unprotected fairways. An alert Secret Service agent spotted the suspected gunman and disaster was averted; Trump was lucky to escape that one, too. Surely, he can stay off the golf course for the next month.
America is burning red-hot this election season, yet party divisions briefly vanished last week as Congress voted unanimously to beef up protection for the former president. He, too, must protect himself and the country by working more cooperatively with the Secret Service to avoid another incident that could be catastrophic.
The Secret Service, for all its past mistakes, is trying to keep the former president safe. But it needs more help from Trump.
