Trump tells New York Post he has left instructions for strikes on Iran if assassination plot succeeds
President Trump says he has pre-authorised military action against Iran should Tehran succeed in an alleged plot to assassinate him, while separately claiming Tehran has asked to resume talks.
President Donald Trump said in an interview with the New York Post published on 10 July 2026 that he has "left instructions" for a punishing US military response should Iran succeed in an alleged plot to assassinate him, while simultaneously asserting that Tehran has asked to resume negotiations with Washington.
The two claims, carried within hours of each other, frame a contradictory posture: a rhetorical ceiling on escalation against Tehran paired with an open diplomatic channel that the same administration says is being targeted by Iranian intelligence. The interview is the most explicit public statement yet from a sitting US president outlining pre-authorised military action against a specific foreign government over an alleged personal-security threat, and it lands in a week when Iran's regional posture and the state of US-Iran diplomacy are both under live negotiation.
What Trump told the Post
In comments relayed by the New York Post and aggregated by multiple channels on 10 July 2026, Trump said he had been "on the Iranians' list for a long time and this is what we are facing" [telegram:alalamarabic, 2026-07-10T15:46]. He added that he had "left instructions" for US action in the event of an assassination attempt, telling the paper the United States should "literally bomb them at levels that they've never seen before" [telegram:ClashReport, 2026-07-10T15:28].
Trump separately warned that if Iran succeeds in its plot, "there will be a heavy price" [telegram:osintlive, 2026-07-10T15:40]. The interview, which the Post has not yet published in full in the materials available to this publication, was framed by Trump as both a warning to Tehran and a reassurance to his domestic audience that contingency planning is in place.
Reporting circulated by Open Source Intelligence framed the comments as part of a wider pattern in which the administration is publicly airing intelligence claims about Iranian plots while simultaneously keeping diplomatic contacts live [telegram:osintlive, 2026-07-10T15:40].
The counter-claim from Tehran
Iranian state media covered the Post interview with the inverse emphasis. Tasnim News, the outlet tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ran the line under a banner describing "the head of the American terrorist government" and highlighted Trump's "fear of being killed" [telegram:tasnimnews_en, 2026-07-10T15:46]. The framing repositions the story: instead of an assassination threat, the headline read for an Iranian audience is a US president visibly anxious about his personal security.
Iranian state-aligned outlets have not, in the materials available to this publication, directly responded to the claim that Tehran has asked to resume talks. The absence of a denial is itself a tell: in past episodes, Iranian denials of diplomatic contacts have travelled quickly through the same channels. The silence leaves open the question of whether the request is being processed through intermediaries rather than answered publicly.
Why both can be true at once
A pre-authorised strike plan and a request for talks are not, on the evidence, mutually exclusive. They are standard instruments in the US-Iran playbook of the last two decades: coercive signalling layered on top of backchannel negotiation, with each side free to deny the existence of the channel when politically useful.
Trump's own statement — that he has been on the threat list "for a long time" — implies that the assassination claim is being used less as fresh intelligence than as justification for a posture already in place. The United States and Iran have, at various points since 2019, moved from tension to talks and back within a single news cycle. The new ingredient this week is the explicit codification of an automatic military response, which raises the cost of any future miscalculation in either capital.
That escalation ladder now exists in two registers at once: a public, unconditional threat of retaliation against Iranian state targets, and a private negotiating channel that Tehran has, by Trump's account, just reopened.
Stakes and what to watch next
The immediate stakes sit in three places. In Washington, the comments harden the political base around an Iran policy that has oscillated between maximum-pressure sanctions and intermittent diplomacy throughout Trump's second term. In Tehran, the Tasnim-led framing of a "terrified" US president is intended for a domestic audience that has been told for decades that Washington fears Iranian power projection. And in the Gulf, where US Central Command posture is calibrated against Iranian-backed proxy capabilities, any incident — real or claimed — now carries an explicit authorisation threshold that did not exist publicly before this interview.
The next data points to watch are whether the New York Post publishes the full transcript; whether Iran's foreign ministry confirms or denies the talks request; and whether Iran-aligned outlets in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen adjust their operational tempo in the days after the comments. None of those movements would, on their own, settle the underlying question of whether a credible plot exists or whether this is a coercive-negotiation phase. The materials available to this publication do not specify the intelligence basis for the assassination claim, the identity of any Iranian services alleged to be involved, or the diplomatic track on which the talks request is said to have arrived.
What can be said with confidence is that as of 10 July 2026, 15:46 UTC, the US president has publicly committed the United States to an escalatory response against Iran should an alleged assassination attempt succeed, while claiming that the same Iranian government has just asked to talk. The gap between those two statements is where the next phase of US-Iran policy will be made.
Desk note: Monexus read this story from Telegram relays of the New York Post interview and from Iranian state-media coverage; the full Post transcript was not in the available sources at publication time and the article is annotated to that limit.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/alalamarabic
- https://t.me/tasnimnews_en
- https://t.me/osintlive
- https://t.me/ClashReport
- https://t.me/osintlive