MAGA Media Is Using the Plot to Kill Trump to Escalate the War With Iran
The same outlets that celebrated Trump killing Iran's supreme leader now call Iran's revenge motiveless evil.
The United States killed Iran’s supreme leader. The Trump administration bragged about it. Now Iran wants to kill Donald Trump, and MAGA media cannot fathom where such barbarism comes from.
The occasion is a warning Israel passed to Washington this week that Iran has a fresh and specific plan to assassinate the president. American intelligence has not verified it. That has not slowed anyone down.
American and Iranian diplomats met in Geneva on February 26 to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program. On February 27, Trump said publicly that he was unhappy with how the talks were going. On the morning of February 28, American and Israeli forces killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at his compound in Tehran, along with much of Iran’s senior leadership and, Iranian state media reported, four members of his family. Trump called the killing “Justice.” Pete Hegseth called it “the most lethal, most complex, and most-precision aerial operation in history.”
Iran buried Khamenei at the end of last week, after six days of processions that state media said drew more than forty million people. Mourners carried red flags, which in Shia Islam signify blood vengeance, and banners in English reading “We Will Kill Trump” and “There Will Be Blood.” They threw stones at a billboard of Trump’s face. A eulogist, Mohammad Rasouli, stood before the coffin and asked the crowd: “Why shouldn’t we kill the one who killed my Imam and my Leader?” He added, “It is a disgrace for us if we do not kill your killer.” Fox News published a statement this weekend from Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader, promising that “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.”
On Friday morning, Fox News’ David Spunt spent about fifteen seconds explaining why Iran wants Trump dead, and never mentioned Khamenei. He reached back six years instead, to Qasem Soleimani, “a beloved figure in parts of Iran” whose killing Iran’s leadership “is still trying to avenge.” Two sentences later, that avenging was the work of “scum,” a regime evil for “47 years.”
He stated the motive and took it back in the same breath.
There is no puzzle here. Iran wants the man who killed its supreme leader dead. The puzzle is that an entire media apparatus watches this happen every day and cannot say it out loud.
MAGA media covered all of it. The Daily Wire ran the banners under a headline about mourners sending a threatening message to America. Legal Insurrection ran the target lists. The Washington Examiner ran the crosshairs and the death chants. Every outlet quoted the eulogist. Not one of them stopped on the words “the one who killed my Imam,” which is the entire sentence, and which is not a metaphor.
Frontpage Mag went further and made the argument out loud. The regime’s hostility to America, it explained, “is based on the nature of both countries,” on America’s existence as a free republic and Iran’s ambitions for its perfect and eternal law. The hostility, in other words, is ontological. It was there before February 28 and would be there without it. That is the whole mechanism stated as doctrine, at the funeral of a man the United States killed, where the mourners were chanting the reason.
Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3, at a celebration of the country’s 250th birthday, Trump told the crowd: “We knocked the hell out of Iran. They’re dying to settle. We gave them a week off for a funeral because we’re nice.” The next day he was watching the mourners and thinking about the men standing among them. “They are all there,” he told Axios. “One shot and we can take them all out, but we are not going to do that because then we would have nobody to negotiate with.”
He does the erasing himself, and never feels the seam. “Their leaders are gone,” he told reporters leaving Turkey. “They had another set of leaders, they’re gone. Now they have another set of leaders, they may be gone. Who knows. I may be gone, too. I’m their number one target.” He lists the leaders America killed and his own spot on the revenge list in the same breath. The list he is on exists because of the list he is reading off.
Dan Hoffman, a former CIA station chief and Fox News contributor, laid out the standard for viewers. An assassination of the president, he said, would be “an act of war,” and America would “rain down hell in response on Tehran,” would “finish them with kinetic strikes.” Huh? By his very own definition, the United States committed the act of war first, on February 28, when it killed Iran’s head of state. Apply the standard evenly and Iran’s missile campaign is retaliation. Hoffman can’t say that.
The erasure extends to the Iranian dead. On Jesse Watters Primetime, Charlie Hurt wanted to know where the anti-regime protesters were. His guest explained that many of them had been killed, called it an incredible massacre, said the survivors were traumatized and afraid. Then he predicted they were chomping at the bit to rise up. The killing of Iranians is offered as the reason they are silent and as the reason they are about to rise on America’s behalf, inside the same answer.
Call it hypocrisy and you’ve let it off easy. Nobody watching is confused, and nobody involved is stupid. The obvious thing has to go unsaid because of what happens the moment it gets said. If Iran wants Trump dead because America killed its supreme leader, then widening the war is a decision, and decisions have to be argued for, in public, by someone willing to own them. If Iran wants Trump dead because Iranians are evil, then widening the war is protection, and protection sells itself. The correspondent, the contributor, the columnist, and the president are all running the same pitch. Strike a country, wait for the blowback anyone could have predicted, and hold the blowback up as the reason the country needed striking.
Then came Wednesday, when Israel told Washington it had intelligence of a fresh, specific Iranian plan to kill Trump. The U.S. intelligence community was cold on it, telling CNN the warning wasn’t verified and might be an Israeli push to sway Trump toward a wider war. Trump waved it off, telling the New York Post that Israel had not alerted him to any new threat, that he was aware of the same general danger that has always been there. On Saturday morning, Matt Whitaker, the American ambassador to NATO, went on Fox News and pronounced the intelligence solid. “First, the threat is real,” he said. “This is not some theoretical idea.” He went on to admire the president’s personal courage.
American intelligence won’t verify the plot. The president says it isn’t new. MAGA media ran it as an emergency anyway, because by then the emergency didn’t depend on it.
The fair objection: Khamenei ran a regime the United States was at war with, and he died in a military strike. A plot to shoot the president on American soil is a different thing, and plenty of serious people think the difference is the whole point. Grant it. Washington still described killing Khamenei in the exact words Tehran now uses for Trump, an evil man whose death was justice. Each side saves “lawful strike” for its own operation and “terrorism” for the other’s.
So concede the part beyond dispute. Iran wants Trump dead, and America handed it every reason. The strikes produce the revenge. The revenge excuses the strikes.
Friday night, Trump posted to Truth Social that a thousand missiles were locked and loaded and aimed at Iran, with thousands more to follow, should Iran act on its threat against him. Orders had already been given. The military was ready to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran for a period of one year, subject to extension. He signed off praising Allah.
A year of bombing, authorized in advance, triggered by an event that has not happened, over a plot the president told a newspaper that same week was nothing new. He does not need the intelligence to be true, and neither does the coverage. Once the enemy wants you dead for no reason, the next war justifies itself. The extension clause is the only honest thing in the post.