Iran's security chief took to social media Tuesday to threaten the life of the President of the United States. Not in coded diplomatic language. Not through back channels. Publicly, on X, for the world to read.
Ali Larijani issued a warning to Trump, telling him he was "not afraid of your empty threats." "Even those greater than you could not eliminate the Iranian nation," Larijani wrote. "Take care of yourself not to be eliminated."e
Trump brushed the threat off in an interview with CBS News, saying he "couldn't care less." That response tells you everything about the current power dynamic. Tehran is screaming. Washington is shrugging.
Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.-Israeli strikes against Iran, has entered its tenth day. The regime that once projected strength across the region is now managing a succession crisis, an oil blockade that's rattling global markets, and the most sustained military campaign in its history.
The U.S. launched a fresh wave of strikes Tuesday, the Daily Mail reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced, "Today will be yet again our most intense day of strikes inside Iran." More fighters. More bombers. More refined intelligence.
The Iranian military's response has been to fire missiles. Its diplomatic corps' response has been to threaten the American president on social media. Neither is working.
Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi cast doubt on Trump's insistence the previous day that the conflict would be over "soon," as Tehran launched a new wave of attacks on U.S.-allied Gulf nations.
Araghchi gave an interview to PBS making Iran's position clear:
After three rounds of negotiation, the American team in the negotiation said itself that we made a big progress. Still, they decided to attack us. So, I don't think talking to the Americans anymore would be on our agenda any more.
Read that carefully. Iran is framing diplomacy as a trap, insisting that three rounds of talks led nowhere but to bombs. What Araghchi omits is the obvious: Iran has spent years lying about its nuclear ambitions, funding proxy armies from Beirut to Sanaa, and dispatching assassins to U.S. soil. Negotiations have been a stalling mechanism. The strikes are the consequence of that calculus.
Iran has effectively stopped tankers from using the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping lane between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, through which 20% of the world's oil is carried.
Brent crude surged to nearly $120 on Monday before retreating, remaining around $90 per barrel on Tuesday, almost 24% higher than when the conflict began.
Trump's response on Truth Social was direct:
If Iran does anything that stops the flow of Oil within the Strait of Hormuz, they will be hit by the United States of America TWENTY TIMES HARDER than they have been hit thus far.
The IRGC responded by claiming it would be the one to "determine the end of the war" and dismissed Trump's warning as "nonsense." A regime that can't protect its own leadership from airstrikes is making bold claims about who controls history. That's not confidence. That's performance.
Trump's stated objective is total, not partial, victory:
We could call it a tremendous success right now… or we could go further, and we're going to go further. We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.
Mojtaba Khamenei was officially announced as Iran's new Supreme Leader on Sunday, succeeding his father, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in an airstrike in the opening moments of Epic Fury. He is 56 years old, confirmed by an 88-person assembly, and already wounded according to Iranian state TV.
Trump made clear he wasn't impressed by the selection. He told Fox News he was "not happy with the appointment," adding that he didn't believe Mojtaba Khamenei could "live in peace," and that the new Supreme Leader "not last long if he doesn't get approval from us."
The IDF issued its own message to Tehran's new leadership structure:
After neutralizing the tyrant Khamenei, the terrorist regime of Iran is attempting to rebuild itself and select a new leader. We want to tell you that the hand of the State of Israel will continue to pursue every successor and every person who seeks to appoint a successor.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu added that Israel is "not done yet" and that the military is "breaking the bones" of the Iranian regime. The message from both Washington and Jerusalem is identical: changing leadership doesn't change the target.
Larijani's threat against Trump lands with particular weight when you understand what Iran has been trying to do on American soil for years.
A federal jury convicted Asif Merchant of murder for hire and attempting to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. Merchant was a trained operative of the IRGC. He admitted at trial that the IRGC sent him to the United States to arrange for political assassinations and steal documents. Merchant arrived in April 2024, met with purported hitmen in June who were in fact undercover U.S. law enforcement officers in New York, and was arrested before leaving the country in July 2024.
Merchant's IRGC handler named three potential targets during discussions in Tehran: then-candidate Donald Trump, then-President Joe Biden, and Nikki Haley, who was still competing in the Republican primary at that point.
Merchant's contact, Nadeem Ali, instead reported his conduct to law enforcement and became a confidential source. The plot died in a New York meeting room.
And the man who ran that operation from Tehran? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the mastermind behind the plot to murder the president was killed while Merchant was on trial.
So the IRGC sent an operative to kill Trump. The operative was caught. The operative was convicted. The IRGC handler was hunted down and killed. And now, Larijani warns Trump to "be careful not to be eliminated."
The regime has a pattern. And the pattern keeps failing.
Iran's leadership is playing to a domestic audience as much as to Washington. The threats are mostly intended for an internal, Iranian audience, as a feigned display of strength amid rumors that Mojtaba Khamenei was severely wounded in a recent airstrike. Defiance is easier to project on Telegram than on a battlefield where your military has been, in Hegseth's words, "systematically degraded and destroyed."
Araghchi says Iran is "well prepared to continue attacking them with our missiles as long as needed and as long as it takes." But the missile rate has already dropped. Hegseth confirmed Iran fired its fewest missiles in the past 24 hours since the start of the war.
Trump says the conflict is "going to be a short-term excursion" and that it will be "finished pretty quickly." He has also been direct about why a decisive end matters:
We want to make sure that we don't have to go back every 10 years, when you don't have a president like me that's not going to do it.
That line contains the honest strategic logic the foreign policy establishment has avoided for decades. Half-measures invite sequels. The world has watched this cycle run twice already, and it has produced an emboldened, nuclear-ambitious Iran each time. A regime that sends assassins to New York, threatens a sitting American president on social media, and fires its last missiles at allied Gulf states while its leadership is being dismantled overhead is not a government that responds to diplomacy.
It responds to consequences. And consequences have arrived.
