(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The New York Times reported Friday that President Donald Trump made the last-minute decision to switch airplanes when leaving a NATO summit in Turkey earlier this month due to a purported assassination threat coming from Iranian proxy forces.
“He had flown into Ankara on the new Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, which lacks the same advanced defensive capabilities of the old Air Force One,” the Times reported, citing anonymous sources.
“After the U.S. government picked up on the threat, the Secret Service urged Mr. Trump to change planes. He later announced that he would be using the old plane to leave the country.”
The Times article follows a Wall Street Journal report from earlier this month, which said that Israel briefed the U.S. with purported intelligence about an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump. The Times said the decision to switch planes in Turkey stemmed from different intelligence than what the Israelis were providing. The Times added that some U.S. officials believe that the Israeli intelligence was intended to convince Trump to escalate his war against Iran.
Trump changed planes at the last minute when leaving Turkey earlier this month due to reported threats from Iranian proxy groups, NYT reports.
According to NYT, this latest purported Iranian threat is a different one than what the Israelis shared earlier this month. https://t.co/ez06oEP94H pic.twitter.com/6E3h8NCokh— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) July 24, 2026
Officials have yet to provide any evidence of a credible Iranian assassination attempt against Trump. This author’s book on the Trump assassination attempts details how the FBI and Israel manufactured dubious evidence that Iran was threatening him—though admittedly the threats may be more legitimate now amidst a full-fledged war between the countries.
There were two assassination attempts against Trump in 2024. One occurred on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, when 20-year-old Thomas Crooks allegedly shot him in the ear from a rooftop during a campaign rally. The other occurred about two months later at Trump’s Palm Beach golf course, where North Carolina man Ryan Routh was spotted by Secret Service hiding in the bushes with an SKS-style rifle a mere few hundred yards away from Trump.
Additionally, a gunman tried storming the White House Correspondents’ Dinner event earlier this year in an apparent attempt to kill Trump and other officials. Trump was on a separate floor from the alleged gunman, Cole Allen, when law enforcement apprehended him.
There’s no evidence that any of those attempt were sponsored by Iran.
The FBI did arrest a Pakistani national named Asif Merchant on July 12, 2024—the day before Trump was shot—for murder-for-hire in an alleged plot to assassinate U.S. officials, including possibly Trump.
However, Merchant’s actions can hardly be called an assassination attempt. Rather, the available evidence suggests that Merchant was the target of a highly controlled FBI sting operation, and that he never posed a threat to Trump.
Indeed, the U.S. was monitoring Merchant before he even entered the U.S. in April 2024, and officials let him into the country to track him and see where he’d go.
Moreover, an FBI informant drove Merchant around while he was here, and introduced him to two undercover agents posing as “hitmen.” Merchant allegedly paid those two agents $5,000 as a downpayment for his plot—which also included staging a protest and stealing documents—and he was arrested as he was attempting to leave the country.
Merchant was found guilty in March.
The FBI did accuse one other man of being involved in an Iranian plot against Trump in a criminal complaint filed in November 2024. In that case, there’s arguably even less evidence of a credible threat to Trump.
Indeed, the defendants in that case—Farhad Shakeri, 51, of Iran; Carlisle Rivera, also known as Pop, 49, of Brooklyn, New York; and Jonathon Loadholt, 36, of Staten Island, New York—were not accused of conspiring to kill any politicians, let alone Trump. Rather, they were charged with plotting to kill a U.S. journalist of Iranian origin.
While Shakeri is one of the defendants, the government’s criminal complaint shows that he appears to have been snitching to the FBI in recent months. According to the charging papers, Shakeri participated in phone interviews with the FBI from Iran on September 30, October 8, October 17, October 28 and November 7—ostensibly trading information in exchange for a sentence reduction for an unidentified individual.
In one of those interviews, Shakeri—who was deported from the United States in 2008 after serving fourteen years in prison for robbery—told the FBI that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps official was pushing him to assassinate Trump.
Shakeri further told the FBI that the IRGC official told him on October 7 that he had to provide a plan to kill Trump within seven days. Shakeri said he was unable to do so, and so Iran decided to pause its plans to kill Trump until after the election—which would have made it easier to kill him if he lost.
The FBI admitted in the charging papers that Shakeri is a liar, but said his claims about Trump “appear to be truthful.” Nevertheless, when the Justice Department secured indictments in the case a month after the criminal complaint was filed, there was no mention of the allegation against Trump.
Loadholt and Rivera both pled guilty to conspiring against the journalist, while Shakeri remains at-large in Iran.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
