The staff on Trump Force One didn’t know they were decoys until they noticed his seat was empty. Instead, Donald Trump was quietly boarding a different plane owned by Steve Witkoff, who would later go on to become his Special Envoy to the Middle East.

In his upcoming book “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power,” journalist Alex Isenstadt pulls back the curtain on a campaign trail haunted by Iranian assassination threats. The catalyst had been Trump’s 2020 decision to kill Iranian military chief Qassem Soleimani. By 2024, Justice Department officials were scrambling to contain an active murder-for-hire plot against then-candidate Trump.

It didn’t help either that Trump had already seen two close calls against his life: one at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and another in Florida. Neither was tied to Iran, but Trump’s security detail wasn’t taking any chances.

Many on the plane worried they would be “collateral damage” if anything happened. When campaign leaders realized what people were thinking, they rushed to assure everyone they weren’t being used as bait. Chris LaCivita, one of Trump’s senior advisers, tried to spin the decoy flight as a practice run, telling the nervous staff it was “a sort of test for how things may happen in the future.”

Isenstadt’s recounting of the event reveals that Trump was more troubled by the claims of an Iranian assassination plot than he publicly let on. The president recently revealed that he left his staff “instructions” to obliterate Iran should they succeed in killing him.

Although Iran has flatly denied the accusations, and for all Trump’s public swagger about leaving “instructions” to obliterate the country if they got to him, Isenstadt’s reporting reveals just how deeply the assassination threats actually shook the 78-year-old president.