Iran allegedly plotted to assassinate President Donald Trump late last year. But that’s not stopping the Trump administration from trying to strike a nuclear deal with Iran. This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Travis Larchuk, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Further reading: Revenge by Alex Isenstadt. Newspaper front pages at a kiosk in Tehran as talks with the US begin. Photo by ATTA KENARE/AFP via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What recent talks have the U.S. and Iran had regarding the nuclear deal?
Representatives from the U.S. and Iran sat down last weekend to try to strike a deal on Iran's nuclear program. These were the highest level talks between the two countries since 2018. And the big surprise is that they're going to meet again this coming Saturday. President Trump in the Oval Office yesterday was asked about Iran, and he said this.
Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. He can't have a nuclear weapon.
Then he said this.
I want them to be a rich, great nation.
Circling back, he said this. They're not going to have one.
And if we have to do something very harsh, we'll do it.
Maybe it's the weave, but President Trump seems to have profoundly mixed feelings about Iran. He believes that Iran tried to kill him last fall and the Department of Justice agreed and filed charges. But Trump is also reaching out to Iran in some ways that have Iran watchers thinking he might be very serious about making a deal. That's coming up on Today Explained.
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Chapter 2: Why did President Trump withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal?
So the nuclear deal that President Obama signed on to was something that was a huge priority for Obama and his administration.
Today, after two years of negotiations— The United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not, a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
It basically decreased economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for having more oversight of Iran's nuclear capabilities.
Iran must complete key nuclear steps before it begins to receive new sanctions relief. And over the course of the next decade, Iran must abide by the deal before additional sanctions are lifted.
What Trump decided to do was do away with that.
I am announcing today that the United States will withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
And basically Trump increased economic sanctions on Iran as a means of putting maximum pressure on the country.
The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and over time reach the brink of a nuclear breakout. The deal lifted crippling economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for very weak limits on the regime's nuclear activity.
There was a sense that Trump's move wasn't necessarily needed and that he was guided by Iran hawks within his administration, people like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, both of whom were advocates of a much stricter approach towards Iran.
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Chapter 3: What were the consequences of Trump's assassination of Qasem Soleimani?
In fact, it did. It launched a strike on U.S. interests in Iraq.
Iran is not allowed.
Good evening. We're coming on the air with breaking news. The Pentagon confirming that Iran has launched a series of ballistic missiles targeting American forces in Iraq.
But at the time, it was something that was really surprising to people.
Well, Iran has confirmed that it has launched what is a conventional strike firing. It says more than a dozen ballistic missiles from inside Iranian territory at bases that house American personnel. Me and my partner, we hit the floor and we felt the big, the big boom.
OK, so now let's move into the present day. Your book, Revenge, contains some really shocking information about what was happening in 2024 while Donald Trump was running for office. There were concerns that Iran was trying to kill him. What happened?
This was something that was picked up within the confines of US intelligence and the Secret Service that they were aware of that they wanted to kill Trump in retaliation for Soleimani. And this is something that was an issue as soon as Trump left the White House, went back to his home in Palm Beach, Florida, basically.
And so as the campaign continued into 2024, the threat of Iran was something that became really intense. And Trump's campaign was attacked by Iranian hackers. And at the same time, there was an increasing threat that Iran would try to kill him.
And in the summer of 2024, Secret Service agents sat down with Trump and they warned him that Iran had teams of agents within the United States that had access to surface-to-air missiles. that those surface-to-air missiles could be used to, conceivably, down his plane, either upon takeoff or upon landing. Do we know how Trump responded to this?
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Chapter 4: How was the threat of assassination against Trump by Iran uncovered in 2024?
And so Steve Witkoff has a G6 Gulfstream jet. And so Trump and his top aides devised a plan where Trump would be on the plane of Steve Witkoff, and then other aides would be on Trump Force One, which the so-called Trump Force One, which is the plane that Trump typically used. And the idea was to essentially turn Trump Force One into a decoy plane.
Well, this is something that did not sit well, as you can imagine, among Trump aides who were on the plane that day. And so they got on the plane. They got on the plane that day and all of them were wondering, where is Trump, right? And then a senior member of leadership tells them, look, the boss isn't going to be flying with us today.
He's on another plane, and this is just a practice dry run for how things are going to go in the future. This did not go over well with the aides. They felt like they were being treated as bait. And at the time, they were really concerned about the threat of Iran, that they could be attacked as well.
In fact, there was one aide who was told by a Secret Service agent at one point that upon getting on the plane, that they should duck. They should duck their heads down out of fear that there might be an assassin somewhere pointing a rifle at them.
President Trump and the people surrounding him were legitimately terrified that he could be killed. Do we know ultimately how far this went? I mean, if at the time there were people in the United States with access to surface to air missiles, we would have to assume that they're still here.
What we do know is that there was someone connected to the Iranian regime who was arrested in connection for being a part of a plot to kill President Trump, who was then candidate Trump at the time. And so we do know that Iran was very interested in this. And we also know that Iran... did succeed in hacking into the campaign's computer system.
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Chapter 5: What security measures did Trump’s campaign take in response to the assassination threat?
And so in a lot of ways, Iran was very aggressive during the 2024 campaign season.
Does the Trump administration today, as we speak, do they still worry about Iran and a threat to the president's life?
You know, it's not something that they've talked about as much recently. Trump was in greater danger as a former president when you had less security protection. It was the threat to Trump and the vulnerabilities he faced really reached a kind of a climax in the summer of 2024 after the two assassination attempts.
Trump was so afraid of Iran that on the campaign trail, he used to boast about his killing of Soleimani. He actually started talking about it less and less over the course of the campaign. The second thing that happened was he started to ask about the staging of events. And that was another thing he was thinking about.
Susie Wiles, who was Trump's co-campaign manager at the time, now his chief of staff, was reaching out to the White House, then the Biden White House, asking for greater Secret Service assets. That's how great the concern was about Trump's safety at the time.
Now that Trump's president and he has much more security assets behind him, there's a lot less concern about where he is from a safety standpoint. But that doesn't mean that they're not concerned about his safety at all points. That's always the concern about a president. But in the summer of 2024, it really reached its heights.
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Chapter 6: How did the threat to Trump's life evolve during the 2024 campaign?
Alex Eisenstedt, this was great. Thank you so much for your time and your insights. We really appreciate this. Thank you. Alex's book is called Revenge. Now, we should note that in January, a week before Inauguration Day, Iran's president, Massoud Pazeshkian, gave an interview to NBC's Lester Holt in which he denied that Iran had ever tried to assassinate Donald Trump.
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Chapter 7: What is the current status of the threat from Iran against Trump?
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Chapter 8: How has Iran officially responded to assassination allegations against Trump?
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This is Today Explained.
I'm Noelle King. So the big news from this first round of Iran talks is that there will be a second round of talks this coming weekend. Trita Parsi, who joins us now, was not as surprised as many analysts. Trita is executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He's also the author of several books about U.S. foreign policy in Iran.
And Trita has been writing that there are real reasons to be optimistic about these talks. And he says this past weekend proves his point.
I think what went really right is that both sides recognized that they need a deal. And that to get a deal, they need to have reasonable demands and not go for this type of maximalist approach that oftentimes has been the case. Both sides have politics in their countries that is very unforgiving of any type of a compromise with Iran or with the United States.
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