" I got him before he got me. They tried twice.
Well, I got him first." That was President Donald Trump's observation, made to ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, in a phone conversation the day after he launched the US military campaign against Iran in February.
An Israeli airstrike, conducted with US approval and co-ordination, had just killed the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top Iranian leaders – and Trump drew a direct line from that attack to threats and alleged plots the Iranians had made against him in previous years. Trump has refrained from similar remarks in the ensuing six months of warfare, but Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has echoed the view."
Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh," he said in March, noting that an unnamed Iranian who he said led an assassination unit had been killed in US strikes. These comments hint at the personal nature of this war – and the concerns by the president and his security team of the threat Iran still poses to his safety.
Those concerns were dramatically illustrated by this week's revelation that Trump secretly switched to an alternate aircraft on his flight back from the Nato summit in Turkey last month. He left the media and most of the White House staff to depart on the presidential Air Force One 747 jet, which became, essentially, a decoy.
It was an elaborate ruse, which included the president being transported to and from aircraft inside a catering truck, in response to what American officials reportedly believed to be credible intelligence of an Iranian missile threat to Air Force One. The White House has given little detail about this threat - but nonetheless it marks another striking episode in the turbulent history of Trump's relationship with Iran.
Government security experts have said such measures are not unusual when a president travels in or near a warzone. Past presidents have travelled to places like Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine under cover of secrecy – but never without at least some prior knowledge by media outlets, under agreements that they would not disclose the movement until after the fact.
The optics of Trump hiding in a catering truck from an apparent Iranian threat are less than ideal for a president who has repeatedly touted his strength - as well as the frailty of Iran's military after months of war. The secrecy in the days and weeks after the Secret Service operation in Ankara may have been, in part, to avoid undermining his public image of power.
