Tehran Feared Consequences of a Trump Win

New court documents released late last week underscore just how desperate the Iranian regime was to keep Donald Trump out of the White House – and why the president-elect’s victory is likely a bad sign for America’s enemies.

Last Friday, the Justice Department formally announced federal charges against Farhad Shakeri, 51, for a thwarted attempt to surveil and ultimately assassinate Trump. According to court documents, Shakeri, who is still at large in Iran, was acting as an operative of Tehran. That news comes following August charges against Asif Merchant, a Pakistani man with ties to the Iranian government who was also allegedly plotting to assassinate Trump and other American political figures.

According to Shakeri, who participated in recorded conversations with law enforcement, his handlers in the Iranian government told him that “we have already spent a lot of money… so money’s not an issue,” implying that he and Merchant were just part of an extensive effort to kill Trump ahead of the 2024 election.

Furthermore, Shakeri said, he was told that if he was unable to put forth a plan in the timeline outlined by Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps would “pause” its plans to kill Trump until after the elections because his handlers believed that Trump “would lose the election and, afterward, it would be easier to assassinate him.”

Shakeri was also tasked with killing several other individuals, including two Jewish-American citizens in New York City and Israeli tourists visiting Sri Lanka.

According to another indictment unveiled by the Justice Department in September, Iranian hackers also infiltrated the devices of top Trump campaign aides in an attempt to influence the 2024 election.

The Iranian government has vociferously denied any connection to Shakeri, Merchant, and the hacking operation. But in the weeks leading up to Election Day, as Trump gained steam in the polls, the Iranian regime adopted a far more hostile stance toward the United States. “If an existential threat arises, Iran will modify its nuclear doctrine,” an advisor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared on November 1. “We have the capability to build weapons and have no issue in this regard.”

Following Trump’s victory on November 5, Iranian Vice President for Strategic Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif issued another thinly veiled threat, stating that Trump “must show that he is not following the wrong policies of the past.” Those “wrong policies” apparently include Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign designed to weaken Tehran’s ability to fund its terrorist proxies in the region like Hamas and Hezbollah.

Tehran has good reason to be concerned about Trump’s return to the Oval Office. As Trump often says, when he left the presidency in 2021 Iran was “weak, broke, and begging to negotiate.” Thanks to Trump’s sanctions, Iranian oil exports plummeted, cutting off the regime’s money supply. As a result, Iran’s accessible foreign currency reserves – which it uses to fund terror – declined from $70 billion to just $6 billion by the time Trump left office.

Trump also withdrew from the Obama Iran Nuclear Deal, which brought Iran closer than ever before to developing a nuclear weapon and left the United States in an untenable negotiating position.

The Middle East saw unprecedented progress toward peace during Trump’s first term, culminating in the Abraham Accords, a major blow to Iran’s efforts to stoke tensions and foment violence in the region.

There are now more ominous signs on the horizon for Tehran as Trump’s second term approaches. Iran’s currency fell to an all-time low shortly after Trump clinched the presidency again, and Trump is reportedly preparing a new wave of sanctions to enact “Maximum Pressure 2.0.”

Trump’s re-election promises to be a stark reversal from the past four years in which Biden eased sanctions and worked to restore the Obama-era nuclear deal – a move which Israel, America’s most important Middle East ally – strongly opposed.

In April, Biden also extended a sanction exemption waiver of $10 billion to the regime – despite a drone attack launched by Iranian-linked militias that killed three Americans and Iran’s role in Hamas’s deadly attacks on Israel last October. This came in addition to another $6 billion that the Biden Administration gave to Tehran in a disastrous exchange for several American hostages last fall.

Unsurprisingly, The Middle East descended into chaos under Biden’s watch, with Hamas and Hezbollah launching attacks on Israel, Iranian-backed Houthis harassing shipping in the Red Sea, and mounting instability throughout the region.

As demonstrated by the increasingly desperate extent of its actions in recent months, Iran knows that a second Trump presidency means an end to its free reign of terror in the Middle East. That America’s enemies fear Trump’s return is as good a sign as any that voters made the right choice.

Neil Banerji is a proud Las Vegas resident and former student at the University of Oxford. In his spare time, he enjoys reading Winston Churchill and Edmund Burke.