Trump’s dramatic plane swap hints at personal stakes of Iran war

“I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”

That was President Donald Trump’s observation, made to ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, in a phone conversation the day after he launched the US military campaign against Iran in February.

An Israeli airstrike, conducted with US approval and co-ordination, had just killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian leaders – and Trump drew a direct line from that attack to threats and alleged plots the Iranians had made against him in previous years.

Trump has refrained from similar remarks in the ensuing six months of warfare, but Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has echoed the view.

“Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” he said in March, noting that an unnamed Iranian who he said led an assassination unit had been killed in US strikes.

These comments hint at the personal nature of this war – and the concerns by the president and his security team of the threat Iran still poses to his safety.

Those concerns were dramatically illustrated by this week’s revelation that Trump secretly switched to an alternate aircraft on his flight back from the Nato summit in Turkey last month. He left the media and most of the White House staff to depart on the presidential Air Force One 747 jet, which became, essentially, a decoy.

It was an elaborate ruse, which included the president being transported to and from aircraft inside a catering truck, in response to what American officials reportedly believed to be credible intelligence of an Iranian missile threat to Air Force One.

The White House has given little detail about this threat – but nonetheless it marks another striking episode in the turbulent history of Trump’s relationship with Iran.

Government security experts have said such measures are not unusual when a president travels in or near a warzone.

Past presidents have travelled to places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine under cover of secrecy – but never without at least some prior knowledge by media outlets, under agreements that they would not disclose the movement until after the fact.

The optics of Trump hiding in a catering truck from an apparent Iranian threat are less than ideal for a president who has repeatedly touted his strength – as well as the frailty of Iran’s military after months of war.

The secrecy in the days and weeks after the Secret Service operation in Ankara may have been, in part, to avoid undermining his public image of power.

The operation, which took more than a month to come to light, also underscores the apparent threat Iran continues to present to US interests in a conflict that the president asserts is all but wrapped up against an adversary he has said has been thoroughly defeated on the battlefield.

Iranian threats against Trump are not new, however.

After Trump, in his first term, ordered the January 2020 missile strike that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) leader Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s leaders promised reprisals against the American president and senior administration leaders.

In one instance, an Iranian mural depicted a drone targeting Trump while he played golf in Florida.

It appears that there were more to these Iranian threats than just posturing.

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.”

Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear research facilities in 2025, and this year’s expansive bombing campaign and naval blockade, prompted a new round of Iranian threats against Trump – and a direct warning by the US president in response.

In July, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Iran had made threats “to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate” him and said 1,000 “missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat”.

The president’s message to Iran was blunt. Many of the recent threats against him have been unequivocal, too.

At the funeral service for Khamenei, held the day before Trump departed Turkey, participants carried a banner that read “#KillTrump”. The following week, in a square in central Tehran, a building featured a large mural of the American president, lying in a black coffin, with the words “We will kill Trump” and “Blood for blood” written below it.

Iran has denied involvement in any previous plots against Trump, but the message – delivered after Khamenei’s death and reports of Iranian civilian casualties in US and Israeli strikes – has been clear.

The war, Iranians are saying, is far from over. And Trump, himself, is a target for revenge.

On the final leg of the journey back to the US from Turkey, as Trump and his travelling media pool were reunited on the same aircraft, the president came back to the press cabin to talk to reporters.

They asked about the unusual journey, which included an order by the Secret Service that the window shades on the decoy plane be closed during takeoff from Ankara.

“I have read all the time I’m number one on their list,” he told them.

“But if I go, you go, right?”

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