(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A forthcoming book about Donald Trump’s return to power makes a wild and unsubstantiated claim that Iran had operatives in the U.S. with access to surface-to-air missiles amidst as part of a possible conspiracy to assassinate him.
To date, the U.S. government has produced no hard evidence of an Iranian plot against Trump. A Pakistani man with ties to Iran was arrested last July for trying to hire an FBI informant as a “hitman,” and another Iranian told the FBI last year that his government was trying to kill Trump—but those cases appear highly dubious, and certainly didn’t pose any real threat to the President.
Nevertheless, former POLITICO and current Axios writer Alex Isenstadt is claiming that “law enforcement officials warned Trump last year that Tehran had placed operatives in the U.S. with access to surface-to-air missiles.”
“Trump’s team worried that the Iranians could try to down his easily recognizable personal jet — better known as “Trump Force One” — as it was taking off or landing,” Isenstadt wrote Monday in a preview of his book, “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.”
According to Isenstadt, Trump’s security detail was so concerned about the Iran threat that it had him travel to an event on a decoy plan owned by Steve Witkoff, who’s now Trump’s envoy to the Middle East. Trump’s staff still rode on Trump Force One with co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, while White House chief of staff Susie Wiles joined Trump on Witkoff’s plane, which was deemed the “Ghost Flight.”
Seems like they ran a hardcore psyop on Trump to convince him of the Iranian conspiracy pic.twitter.com/bbeocCbemX
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) February 11, 2025
“The boss ain’t riding with us today,” LaCivita reportedly told the group on Trump Force One. “We had to put him into another plane. This is nothing but a sort of test for how things may happen in the future.”
Staffers were reportedly unhappy about being used as bait.
“Campaign leaders tried to assure Trump aides they weren’t being used as bait. But if Iranian operatives had access to surface-to-air missiles, several aides wondered, why were they put on board?” Isenstadt wrote.
“The flight was a surreal experience, with ‘gallows humor galore,’ three aides later told me. ‘This was some serious sh*t,’ they said those onboard realized.”
Isenstadt’s Monday article comes after Trump said last week that he’s given his advisers instructions to obliterate Iran if it assassinates him.
“If they did that they would be obliterated,” Trump said last Tuesday in an exchange with reporters while signing an executive order 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.”
Trump ordered the 2020 killing of Qassem Soleimani, who led the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
