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Topics: Donald Trump, Iran, Politics, US News, World News, Joe Biden
Poppy Bilderbeck
Topics: Donald Trump, Iran, Politics, US News, World News, Joe Biden
Donald Trump has spoken out after an assassination threat was made against him on Iranian state TV.
Shortly after Donald Trump entered his first term as president of the United States in 2017, relations between the US and Iran took a nosedive.
Alongside abandoning a nuclear deal, tightening economic restrictions, tankers being hit, and a US military drone shot down, Iran's top military commander was killed by a US drone strike in January 2020 - the strike ordered by Trump.
Following Gen Qasem Soleimani's death, Commanders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard vowed to seek 'severe revenge'. And with ongoing protests over Iran's struggling economy, seeing Trump encourage protestors not to give up, the POTUS has certainly put himself in the firing line even further.
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The death toll from the protests exceeds that of any other time of political unrest in Iran in decades, and during an interview with Politico, Trump dubbed Ayatollah Khamenei 'a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people'.
The POTUS also voiced he thinks it's 'time to look for new leaders in Iran' which prompted the response from Iran's armed forces spokesperson General Abolfazl Shekarchi: "Trump knows that if any hand of aggression is extended toward our leader, we not only cut that hand but also we will set fire to their world."
An Iranian state TV segment which aired on January 14 also showed an image of Trump surrounded by Secret Service agents following the 2024 assassination attempt at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, with the added caption: "This time, [the bullet] won't miss."
Amichai Stein, a correspondent for i24 News and The Jerusalem Post, shared the post on X with a translation from Farsi.
In an interview with NewsNation's Katie Pavlich, Trump addressed the threat, confirming a plan is in place should Iran indeed 'cut that hand'.
He said: "Well, they shouldn't be doing it, but I've left notification. If anything ever happens, we're going to blow, the whole country is going to get blown up."
Trump then went on to critique Biden before reiterating his stance on Iran's threat.
"Originally, Biden should have said something, you know, when they made a statement, we always said, why isn't Biden saying anything, because he didn't," he continued.
"But a president has to defend a president, like if I were here and they were making a threat to somebody, not even a president, but somebody like they did with me, I would absolutely hit them so hard."
Trump resolved: "I have very firm instructions. Anything happens, they're going to wipe them off the face of this Earth."