Trump ‘got the last laugh,’ Hegseth says of US killing Iranian assassination plotter
US President Donald, left, and Pete Hegseth, US secretary of defense, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The leader of an Iranian unit behind an attempted 2024 plot to assassinate President Donald Trump has been killed, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday as he gave an update on the administration’s war against Tehran.
“Yesterday, the leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed,” Hegseth said. “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”
The secretary did not name the individual, and later said the killing was not the objective of the operation.
“We’ve known for a long time that Iran had intentions on trying to kill President Trump and or other U.S. officials,” Hegseth said.
“While that was not the focus of the effort by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, never raised by the president or anybody else, I ensured, and others ensured, that those who were responsible for that were eventually part of the target list,” he added.
In the summer of 2024, when Trump was campaigning for president, U.S. intelligence indicated there was an Iranian threat to assassinate Trump, prompting the Secret Service to increase his security protection.
In November 2024, the Department of Justice charged an Iranian man who prosecutors said was tasked with surveilling and killing Trump to avenge the 2020 death of Qassem Soleimani, the top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani was killed in a January 2020 U.S. drone strike in Baghdad directed by Trump.
Iran has denied that it had plotted to kill Trump.
President Trump, in a phone call with ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl, mentioned the assassination plot when discussing the U.S. and Israeli strike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“I got him before he got me,” Trump told ABC’s Karl on Sunday night. “They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”
Hegseth on Wednesday also announced that the U.S. submarine had sunk an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean named the “Soleimani,” the first time a U.S. submarine had sunk a ship since World War II.
Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump, speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Grapevine, Texas, US, on Friday, March 27, 2026. (Photographer: Shelby Tauber/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Monday vacated contempt-of-Congress charges against ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who had refused to honor a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 , 2021, attack, and later served a four-month sentence.
The Court did not explain its decision. There were no noted dissents.
In a brief order, the Court noted that the Trump Justice Department has moved to drop the indictment against Bannon and returned the case to a lower court for dismissal.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Vehicles pass near shipping containers stacked at the Port of Los Angeles on May 28, 2026 in Los Angeles, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration is proposing a broad new set of tariffs on dozens of key trading partners, including the European Union, China, Mexico and Canada — an aggressive move to rebuild the president’s signature economic policy after many of his tariffs were struck down by the Supreme Court.
The announcement came in a report released late Tuesday by the office of U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
The report accused 60 trading partners of failing to enact or enforce laws around “forced labor,” using that as a justification to impose tariffs of up to 12.5%. The tariffs target 99% of imports to the United States, the report said.
Under the proposal, countries including China, the United Kingdom, Japan and Brazil would face additional tariffs up to 12.5%. Mexico, Canada, and the European Union would face additional 10% tariffs.
These new tariffs are not yet in effect. The USTR said it will hold a public hearing on the proposed actions on July 7, 2026.
The administration launched investigations in March into various trading partners under Section 301 after the Supreme Court ruled in February that President Donald Trump could not impose sweeping global tariffs under a separate authority, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The administration’s issued roughly $20 billion in refunds on those tariffs so far, according to a court filing last week.
Though many of Trump’s other tariffs are still in effect, with the overall effective tariff rate still at the highest level since the 1940s, according to the Yale Budget Lab. It estimated the current tariff policy, without the proposed new additions, could cost the average American household up to $1,200 per year.
The USTR report claimed that 54 economies “have failed to impose a legal prohibition on the importation of goods produced wholly or in part with forced labor and to effectively enforce such a prohibition.”
Those countries include Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Australia, The Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Hong Kong, China, India, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan; Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Morocco, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria; Norway, Oman, Peru, the Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Venezuela and Vietnam.
It also said that six economies “have failed to effectively enforce a forced labor import prohibition.” Those countries, according to the report, are Canada, Ecuador, the European Union, Indonesia, Mexico and Pakistan.
Greer said Tuesday on CNBC that the Trump administration would soon release the results of these several Section 301 trade investigations, saying they were “nuanced.”
“We’re trying to go very carefully to change the terms of trade between the United States and the rest of the world,” he said.
U.S. President Donald Trump greets Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a bilateral meeting at Gimhae Air Base on October 30, 2025 in Busan, South Korea. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — When President Donald Trump arrives in Beijing next Thursday, he’ll be the first U.S. president to set foot in China in nearly a decade. The last visit was Trump’s own, in 2017.
He arrives in a very different position than he expected: the trip was originally scheduled for earlier this spring, then postponed because of the Iran war.
Trump had said the war would only last four to six weeks. Instead, there’s no end in sight with the the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed and U.S. gas prices surging — as the president faces record-low approval ratings.
That backdrop has flipped the leverage dynamic, according to experts who study the region.
The leverage flip
Beijing would have preferred this war never started — the energy disruption and the hit to global demand are real headaches for an export-dependent economy, experts say. But they say the conflict has handed Xi a relative advantage: Trump now has too many fires to put out at home and abroad to risk another escalation cycle with China.
“China is a relative bright spot in Trump’s foreign policy right now,” said Jon Czin, a former director for China at the National Security Council.
The longer the Iran war drags on, Czin argued, the more it minimizes the chance of another economic confrontation — Beijing has also already demonstrated it can retaliate — as it did with tariffs and rare earth export controls — and the administration backed down before.
Both sides are still trying to eke out an edge in the run-up. The Treasury Department recently sanctioned Chinese oil refiners and shipping firms tied to Iranian crude to cut off funding. In an unprecedented move, Beijing invoked a “blocking rule” for the first time, directing Chinese companies not to comply with sanctions on Chinese oil refiners.
Daniel Shapiro, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, points out the war has reduced the U.S. military posture in the Indo-Pacific with long-term consequences for deterring China and defending Taiwan.
“Trump’s position and leverage at the summit is considerably weaker if he goes to Beijing with the war still unsettled, or even with renewed escalation. And the Iranians know that. So they are whittling down the terms to end the war to something much more modest than what Trump originally envisioned,” Shapiro wrote in a post on X.
What Trump wants
The administration clearly wants Beijing to use its influence over Tehran. Secretary of State Marco Rubio this week urged Beijing to use the Iran’s foreign minister’s visit to China earlier this week to press Tehran on reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
“I hope the Chinese tell him what he needs to be told,” Rubio said when asked about China’s top diplomat meeting with Iran’s foreign minister. “And that is that what you are doing in the strait is causing you to be globally isolated. You’re the bad guy in this.”
Beyond the war in Iran, Trump will be looking for wins on trade and investment: For instance, Chinese commitments to buy Boeing planes and U.S. agricultural goods as well as an extension of the trade truce reached during the last Trump-Xi meeting in South Korea last year, according to experts.
The administration also wants China to continue its pause on rare earth export controls, analysts say. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has also proposed a “Board of Trade” to manage economic ties between the countries and goods the two sides are trading.
What Beijing wants — and what it doesn’t
Here’s the gap between the administration’s public framing and what analysts who study China most closely are saying: Beijing doesn’t actually plan to deliver much on Iran or get deeply involved.
Beijing’s statement after the meeting with the Iranian Foreign Ministry was carefully worded to not blame Iran for the crisis while also calling for greater efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz.
“The Chinese are not interested in assuming any kind of direct role in the conflict,” according to Patricia Kim, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They see this as a problem that the United States needs to solve, and they have no interest in intervening on Tehran’s behalf.”
Czin’s read is similar. While Beijing’s meeting with the Iranian foreign minister this week let it “posture as peacemakers,” he says the Chinese don’t want Iran to take up too much summit time. His analog: even on North Korea, right on China’s doorstep, Beijing rarely puts real pressure on Pyongyang.
China’s energy buffer is part of why the urgency is lower than the Trump administration assumes. Beijing has built strategic oil reserves, invested heavily in green energy, and can shift to domestically produced coal. The bigger risk for China isn’t the energy crunch itself.
“The bigger issue for China is the secondary and tertiary effects from this conflict,” Czin said — such as a war-driven global slowdown that hits the Southeast Asian and European consumers that Chinese exports depend on.
What Beijing actually wants from the summit is more stability: lock in the trade truce, push back on U.S. export controls on advanced technology and ease restrictions on Chinese investment in the U.S.
What’s unclear is how hard Xi will push Trump on Taiwan. Any small shift in U.S. declaratory language on Taiwan would be significant, though Czin is skeptical Trump would stick with new wording even if he agreed to it.
Bottom line
Expect fanfare, expect deliverables on the margins — purchase commitments or a possible Board of Trade announcement — and don’t expect breakthroughs on the hard issues, experts say.
The summit’s significance is less in what it produces than in what it preserves: a tenuous stability that both leaders, for different reasons, want to keep intact through the rest of the year.
