The latest Iranian assassination threat arrived last month as a video called “Where to Kill Barron Trump,” promising $10 million for the murder of the U.S. president’s youngest child. Less than 24 hours later, on social media, the State Department re-upped its own $10 million bounty for “information” about five leaders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including Majid Khademi, the intelligence-office commander.The State Department offer, part of its Rewards for Justice program, first circulated on March 20. A few weeks later, the Israeli government took credit for killing Khademi in an air strike on Tehran, adding an ominous note to the U.S. government’s decision to recirculate the poster. I asked the State Department whether this was deliberate, so soon after Iran’s announcement of a $10 million bounty for the president’s son. An official declined to comment on “internal deliberations” but noted that information obtained through the Rewards for Justice program can be used to “support a range of U.S. government responses to disrupt threats, consistent with U.S. law and policy.”Threats of assassination have, from the start, been dark and disruptive subplots of the U.S.-Iran war. Both sides have made the tactic central to their national strategies, though the executions have been rather one-sided, as President Trump and his Israeli allies have overseen the widespread killing of Iran’s senior leadership. The impact on the American government has nonetheless been profound. “We are aware of ongoing threats from the Iranian regime and its proxies and take them extremely seriously,” the State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott told me in a written statement. “We will not hesitate to act to protect U.S. government officials, current and former, and their families.”Iran clearly sees the propaganda value of threatening American officials. Murals in Tehran now depict Trump, members of his family, and other senior U.S. officials in coffins. Hey Terrorist! Get Ready To Die, reads one apparently AI-generated billboard that shows Trump looking skyward on a golf course. Iran’s army chief promised a $30,000 bounty last month to any Iranian man who kills or captures a U.S. service member, without specifying a target location. (Women would be paid twice as much.) In addition to threatening Barron, Iranian outlets have released a “How to Kill Melania” video about the first lady, and published a target list of multiple world leaders and U.S. Cabinet members. “The criminal, disgraceful murderers of the martyred Leader, whose names are fully documented from the highest to the lowest ranks, will carry their dream of a peaceful death in bed to the grave,” Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader, said in a written statement on July 11. He succeeded his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was assassinated by Israeli air strikes on his compound on the first day of the war.But the Iranian campaign is not limited to posturing. Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that “Iran tried to murder” one of his sons, an apparent reference to 35-year-old Yair Netanyahu. In July, Israeli intelligence described an Iranian plot to use a French resident, Servet Ozkur, to recruit assassins to target senior officials in Israel. Iran has repeatedly sent assassins to kill Trump and other U.S. officials, according to the Justice Department, as punishment for Trump’s 2020 order to assassinate the Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. About a week after the start of the Iran war this year, a federal jury in Brooklyn convicted Asif Merchant, the architect of one of two alleged Iranian plots in the United States. Prosecutors claimed that Merchant, a Pakistani national trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, had entered the United States with orders to recruit “mafia” hit men. But Merchant ended up speaking with undercover officers, telling them they would receive instructions on the target after he left the country. He was arrested before he made it to the airport and faces a sentence of up to life in prison.Assassination was clearly on Trump’s mind when the elder Khamenei was killed. “I got him before he got me,” Trump told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl in March. “They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”The U.S. presidency has long been a dangerous job. Trump has faced at least three assassination attempts by domestic assailants. Those attacks, along with Iran’s threats, are reshaping the lives of the president and his advisers, and restricting Trump’s ability to interact with the country he governs.Earlier this year, at a summit in Ankara, Trump told reporters that his own chance of dying in office was 5.2 percent, dramatically higher than that of race-car drivers and bull riders. (He did not provide a source for his comparisons. Of the 45 men elected president, four, or about 8.9 percent, have been assassinated in office.) Trump said at the same appearance that “I’m No. 1 on the kill list for Iran.” Then the president turned his traveling press corps and two Cabinet officials into flying decoys when he snuck out a side door of Air Force One as it sat on the tarmac, to avoid a purported Iranian plot to target the plane. After a short ride in a catering truck, he boarded a different plane and flew to his next stop, in England.[Read: The Qataris gave Trump an airplane. He crippled their country in return.]The logistics of presidential travel are now far more burdensome than they were when Trump first took office. The Secret Service’s personal-protection budget has nearly doubled since 2016. New airspace restrictions have been imposed over Mar-a-Lago. Lafayette Park, just north of the White House, has been closed for months for security; there are plans to install new fencing that would further obstruct public access. The new White House ballroom, the U.S. Army has argued in court, is “essential to ensure uninterrupted command and control” given the new threats of a drone attack.A number of Cabinet officials and top White House aides now live on military bases to protect themselves and their families, in certain cases because of specific foreign threats. Other rank-and-file White House advisers, unnerved by a homegrown assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in April, have receded from the city where they live. “People are just more careful about where they go and, frankly, how often they are out in public,” a White House official told me.All of this portends a grim future in which assassination moves from an extreme risk to a more commonplace threat. Perhaps that will lead to a reassessment of its use as both a tool of U.S. foreign policy and a way to menace an enemy’s senior officials. “At some stage, I do wonder whether politicians thinking about themselves actually come to the conclusion that they are signing their own death warrants or essentially undermining their own democracies” by promoting the extrajudicial killing of their enemies, Simon Ball, a professor at the University of Leeds, in England, and the author of Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, told me. He added that assassination threats are now such a regular fact of life that to have protection against them confers a macabre prestige. “Elite status is defined by whether you have protection from assassination,” Ball said. “If you do not have protection, you are not important. You are little people.”The assassination threats from Iran have had a big impact on Trump’s life, but administration officials contend that the threats have played no role in Trump’s decision to attack Iran, which he did in June 2025 and again in February, citing the need to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, among other reasons. “He has never equated their threats against him as a reason for doing this,” one senior administration official told me. “He views the threats against him as a part of the job.”But the military has made killing those who allegedly threaten the president part of the campaign. Four days after the conflict began, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth walked into the Pentagon with triumphant news about an Israeli strike the night before. The U.S. and Israel, he announced, had hunted down the “leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump.”On the one hand, Hegseth suggested that the strike was a personal victory for the president. “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh,” Hegseth told reporters. On the other hand, he said that Trump had not concerned himself with the strikes. Going after the president’s assassins, Hegseth said, “was not the focus of the effort by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, never raised by the president or anybody else.” Instead, by his account, it seems to have just sort of happened as a favor to the boss. “I ensured, and others ensured, that those who were responsible for that were eventually part of the target list,” Hegseth said.Trump has similarly blurred these lines, sometimes focusing on the threat and at other times dismissing it. After Cole Tomas Allen, a tutor from California, was apprehended while attempting to infiltrate the Correspondents’ Dinner armed with multiple guns and knives, Trump told reporters that “I don’t think about” the prospect of assassination, and “if I did, I wouldn’t be doing a very good job here.” But hours before B-2 bombers struck Iran in June last year, the president told reporters after disembarking Air Force One in New Jersey that they had put themselves in danger just by standing next to him. “Be careful,” he said.Trump has also made clear that any nation that assassinated him would face apocalyptic retaliation. “I’ve left instructions. If they do it, they get obliterated. There won’t be anything left,” he said of Iran two weeks after taking office last year. This July, hours before Mojtaba promised revenge for his father’s death, Trump posted on social media that even an attempted assassination on him would result in a military response: “Orders have already been given, and the U.S. Military is ready, willing, and able, for a one year period of time, subject to extension, to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.”[Read: Dan Driscoll’s parting shot]Iranian officials have been ambiguous about how seriously the U.S. should take its threats. Days after the Barron video began circulating on Tebyan.net, an arm of the Iranian government’s propaganda machine, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Mohsen Rezaei, called the threats against Barron a lie and dismissed the alleged plot against Trump in Turkey as “false news.” But in the same interview with Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV, Rezaei—whose predecessor was killed by Israeli strikes in March—said Iran would send Netanyahu “to hell.”The claim received scant coverage. World leaders plotting to kill one another has become routine.