Trump skipped a trip to CPAC in Hungary in 2022 because of the Iranian threat — one of several past security incidents that take on renewed significance today.
In 2022, Donald Trump’s political team weighed traveling to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, Hungary.
But as the president’s top political aide Susie Wiles explained to multiple people later in the campaign, Trump did not end up attending the conservative confab in person because senior aides believed the Secret Service couldn’t keep him safe from the threat of Iranian retaliation for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander killed in a Trump-ordered U.S. airstrike in 2020. Rather than risk serious security lapses on this overseas trip, Trump’s team played it safe. He greeted conference attendees via video-message instead.
Later in the campaign — after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pa., which involved drone surveillance — two suspicious men were spotted flying a drone over the campaign’s West Palm Beach headquarters. While the men were never apprehended and their motive is still unknown, senior campaign staff suspected they may have been part of an Iranian murder-for-hire plot, which shows how seriously those closest to Trump took the threat of retaliation from Tehran.
These previously unreported details illustrate the serious threat Tehran posed to the president’s security apparatus before and during Trump’s 2024 campaign, and demonstrate how concerned his inner circle was about his security after he left office in 2021. Those concerns were prescient, considering the threats later metastasized into a successful Iranian hack-and-leak operation on the campaign and a foiled murder-for-hire plot against the president.
That Iran has posed an active threat to the president for years carries geopolitical significance five months into Trump’s second term, as he weighs his next move in the Middle East days after ordering B-2 stealth bombers to strike multiple nuclear facilities in Iran on Saturday. Those strikes followed targeted Israeli strikes on Iran last week and prompted Tehran to launch retaliatory rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Qatar and Iraq on Monday. According to news reports, the U.S. military successfully intercepted those rockets and there were no casualties.
As Trump weighs his next move, those who have worked for the president for years speculate that the regime’s assassination plots against him hardened his resolve against Iran. If a country is willing to green-light an assassination plot against an American president, the theory went, then what are they willing to do with a nuclear weapon?
Others who know the president well say that his decision to strike Iran stemmed from what he’s said publicly — Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb. “Everybody knows Iran’s leaders are a bunch of bad dudes, that they’d love to kill us, and tried,” said a senior official close to the president. “There are some that will want to make it a personal thing with Trump, that he’s doing this because they tried to kill him,” this source said, but “I don’t think for a minute that that really drives the decision-making in the White House.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Few of Us Knew’
From very early on in the 2024 cycle, senior Trump campaign staff were extremely concerned about foreign adversaries hacking the campaign or even physically harming Trump in order to prevent the election of a president they viewed as a unique threat among the potential candidates for office. The concerns were heightened by a belief that the Biden White House was refusing to provide Trump and his campaign with sufficient Secret Service protection.
As the campaign progressed, senior Trump campaign staffers began receiving new information surrounding Tehran’s assassination plots against Trump, and began hearing from intelligence officials that the Iranians were growing increasingly committed to hacking their communications. Few staffers were clued into the high-level threat surrounding active hacking operations from the Iranians and active assassination plots from Tehran, but senior campaign officials were very wary.
Latent threats always persisted, but the threat grew more serious over time.
The Iranians gave a “green light to try to kill the president” which was “known” by the intelligence community, a former senior campaign staffer explained in an interview. And as the assassination threat level increased, so did hacking attempts by the Iranians. “We knew they were trying to get logistics information. And very few of us knew that there was an active assassination threat.”
U.S. officials came to West Palm Beach in midsummer to hold two briefings on the Iran threat: one with the president and another with senior members of his campaign team. In many ways, the escalated threat wasn’t surprising. The world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran had pledged to avenge Soleimani’s death ever since the Trump-ordered strike in 2020, and in 2022, U.S.-based members of the anti-regime think-tank community publicly revealed that they had been targeted by Iranian cyber-phishing and in-person surveillance operations.
As the campaign heated up, senior aides kept requesting additional Secret Service protection but were repeatedly rebuffed, sources told National Review.
While the Secret Service initially denied that they had rejected the Trump campaign’s requests for additional protection, the agency later admitted they had denied some requests for additional security resources and personnel at events. By fall of 2024, those requests included expanded flight restrictions over the president’s campaign events and residences, military aircraft and ground transport vehicles, and bulletproof glass for campaign rallies, the New York Times reported in October 2024.
Days after Thomas Crooks’s failed assassination attempt on the then-GOP nominee in Butler, Pa., on July 13, news outlets revealed growing concerns among U.S. officials surrounding Iranian plots to assassinate Trump. In September, law enforcement officials narrowly scuttled another attempt on Trump’s life on his Florida golf course by a man named Ryan Routh. Law enforcement hasn’t linked either assassination attempt to an Iranian murder-for-hire plot, but they also haven’t ruled out a connection.
Assassination fears ballooned after the Butler and West Palm Beach assassination attempts, escalating staff-wide fears that a rogue domestic actor would shoot the president at a campaign rally or one of his residences.
But sources tell National Review that concern surrounding Tehran’s threats against the president was a major feature of the 2024 campaign among the president’s innermost circle — and for good reason.
In July, Asif Merchant, a Pakistani national with ties to Iran, was arrested and charged with a foiled plot to kill U.S. government officials. He was indicted in September, the same month three U.S. intelligence agencies released a joint statement declaring: “Iranian malicious cyber actors in late June and early July sent unsolicited emails to individuals then associated with President Biden’s campaign that contained an excerpt taken from stolen, non-public material from former President Trump’s campaign as text in the emails.”
And in November, Manhattan prosecutors revealed that the Iranian regime ordered Farhad Shakeri, an Afghan national and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps asset, to lead a murder-for-hire operation to kill Trump.
“It’s clear now why they wanted to do that plot because he’s more supportive of standing up to them than the previous administration was,” a former senior Trump campaign staffer told National Review. This former campaign aide emphasized that the sophistication of Tehran’s murder-for-hire operation, as laid out in the indictment, distinguished this assassination threat from other persistent threats throughout the cycle.
The president’s decision to green-light U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites — which followed Israel’s targeted strikes and a 60-day warning from Trump urging Iran to come to the negotiating table — has drawn pushback from restrainers on the right, even though Trump ordered the Soleimani strike in 2020 and has maintained for years that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon.
“Iran’s nuclear program must be stopped — by any and all means necessary. Period,” Trump wrote in his 2011 book Time to Get Tough, a point he’s reiterated consistently for more than 15 years. “We cannot allow this radical regime to acquire a nuclear weapon that they will either use or hand off to terrorists.”
Pressed by The Atlantic last weekend on what he makes of restraint-minded foreign policy critics on the right who have argued that aggression toward Iran runs contrary to “America First” foreign policy, Trump said only he decides what the term means.
“Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that,” Trump told The Atlantic. “For those people who say they want peace—you can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon. So for all of those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon—that’s not peace.”
Suspicious Drones, Intel Briefings, and Changing Protocol
In the final months of the 2024 presidential cycle, Trump campaign staffers were understandably extremely on edge about assassination threats against their boss.
First came the successful Iranian hacking operation in summer 2024. Shortly thereafter came two separate assassination attempts on Trump in July and September. And in another reported incident in the fall, the president’s security detail was so worried about the Iranian regime’s access to surface-to-air missiles that they had Trump travel to a campaign event on a decoy plane owned by his friend turned Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. Not everyone on the Trump team had clearances, meaning they weren’t clued in to the classified details that prompted the decision to use a decoy plane. But once they boarded the campaign and realized Trump wasn’t there, the understanding from some mid-level staffers was that the plane’s only purpose was to take a missile for the president if the moment came.
Throughout the campaign, there were a litany of other strange, isolated incidents that stoked worries about which malign actors were surveilling the campaign.
One day soon after the Butler assassination attempt, two suspicious-looking men were spotted flying a drone over the campaign’s West Palm Beach headquarters. Campaign staffers flagged them down to security, but the men flying the drone hopped in the car and sped away before they could be apprehended. At the time, there was concern among some senior staff that the drone operators could be linked to Iran.
Following that incident, law enforcement presence at the Florida campaign headquarters was heightened for the rest of the campaign.
When staffers were onboarded for the 2024 campaign, there were perennial fears that a foreign hack was extremely likely. Some outside consultants opted against getting an official Trump email address because they were worried they’d be hacked, and many staff on the official payroll tried to limit their own email communications in favor of relying on texts, calls, or the encrypted messaging app Signal.
The Iranians successfully hacked Wiles’s email account, obtaining the campaign’s vice-presidential vetting materials on JD Vance and raising concerns about foreign adversaries’ access to campaign logistics, which were often sent to staff over email. Prosecutors later revealed that the cyber attackers provided the GOP campaign’s debate preparation materials to then-President Joe Biden’s campaign on the day of the debate. The hack-and-leak operation also sent information to multiple news outlets.
Toward the end of the campaign, security was heightened. Post-Butler, sources say there was a night and day difference in terms of the security assets they were given, from drone defense to vehicles.
Following the Butler assassination attempt, campaign staffers recall senior aides becoming more worried about drones at the president’s residences and rallies, though junior and mid-level campaign aides say senior staff did their best to keep calm and collected. In one reported incident, a Secret Service agent shot down a drone following the president’s motorcade. And fears surrounding the drone incident at the West Palm Beach headquarters were justified, considering the would-be Butler assassin is believed to have flown a drone over the Butler fairgrounds to scope out the site before opening fire on the president, according to news reports.
Aides also became more worried about the staging of rallies, particularly those held outdoors. The president’s planned appearance at an Iowa State football game in September prompted heightened concern, campaign aides recall.
Senior campaign hands had security assessments performed at their homes. Numerous events prompted staff-wide, remedial cybersecurity trainings reminding staff of best practices: don’t use simple passwords, enable two-factor authentication, don’t put anything in email that you don’t want exposed eventually. In early September, staffers at the campaign’s West Palm Beach headquarters recall one floor being temporarily shut down for a security sweep following reports of suspicious listening devices in the building. The incident ended up being a false alarm, a New York Times report revealed — someone had purchased plastic beeping devices on Amazon and placed them around the office as a joke.
But the apparent prank infuriated senior staff, who took the threat seriously at an already-perilous time when the entire team was already on edge.
Security protocol also evolved over time, especially after the Butler assassination attempt. Earlier on in the campaign, staffers could predict where the president’s personal plane would be parked on the airfield after campaign events. Near the tail end of the campaign, staffers noticed that the president’s plane routes and locations on the tarmac became less predictable, a shell game of sorts designed to confuse threatening actors’ perceptions of the president’s movements in response to intelligence threats. The president’s aircraft was always put in a position where a direct line of sight to the airplane was eliminated. Oftentimes, that meant parking the plane behind dump trucks. The president’s motorcade routes also changed as security heightened.
Strange incidents popped up that put staffers on edge. One former campaign staffer recalled a time when the motorcade had reached its desired location and law enforcement officials directed staffers to keep their heads down when exiting a campaign vehicle, urging them to move quickly to the next location. The staffer recalled thinking: “What you mean keep your head down?”
While some of the incidents revealed here are now years old, the heightened sense of threat that surrounded Trump and his campaign has taken on a renewed importance as the president weighs his next move in the Middle East.