The Biden administration warned Iran in 2022 not to target any US citizens, after unearthing a plan to target former Trump National Security Adviser John Bolton.

And in July 2024, US law enforcement arrested a Pakistani man , Asif Merchant, who allegedly had ties to the IRGC, for plotting to kill Trump. Four months later, an Afghani citizen, Farhad Shakeri, was charged with another assassination scheme against Trump.

Merchant was convicted in March 2026, but Shakeri, who US prosecutors allege was directed by an IRGC official, is still at large.

Although these attempts were foiled during the planning stages, the physical risks Trump faced as he sought a return to the White House were all too apparent.

In July 2024 he was left bloodied after a gunman opened fire at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Two months later, an armed man was arrested in Florida after US Secret Service agents spotted him hiding in the trees near where Trump was playing golf.

"It was a galvanising moment for him," Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for the New York Times, said in a recent interview when discussing both the Iranian plots and assassination attempts of 2024. "All of that in his mind becomes one big blur."

"For Trump himself, Iran and this feeling of being under threat is constant," she said.

The president, according to the news website Semafor , often muses - and jokes - about becoming a target of assassination.

"Nobody told me how dangerous it is to be president, and if they had told me, I probably wouldn't have run," one White House official recounted Trump as saying. "And he makes comments like that in jest, but there's a reality behind that."