Just after noon on November 2, 2018, Donald Trump did a silly thing.

In what The New Yorker aptly described as “his weirdest foreign-policy ploy to date,” Trump pre-announced new sanctions on Iran using a “Game Of Thrones”-inspired meme depicting himself with the caption “SANCTIONS ARE COMING.”

Iran’s Qassem Soleimani was (more than) happy to play along. Just hours later, he posted his own “Game Of Thrones” meme. “I WILL STAND AGAINST YOU,” it read.

Here are the memes, side by side, for your amusement:

And just like that, the President of the United States was in a juvenile meme war with the world’s most feared military-intelligence operative.

It was an unbearably stupid moment for the US. For Iran too, but Soleimani had an affinity for social media. And you’d anyway expect that sort of thing from a regime prone to overwrought propaganda. But not from The White House.

Soleimani proceeded to threaten Trump. Personally. He threatened Trump personally. And he did it more than once. 16 months and one day later, Trump had Soleimani incinerated at Baghdad airport along with Mahdi al-Muhandis. It was a risky decision, to put it mildly. “Franz Ferdinand” trended that evening on American social media.

Trump’s brazen decision to assassinate Soleimani and al-Muhandis (a larger-than-life figure in his own right, by the way) turned out to be a stroke of strategic genius. It wasn’t just that Iran had no good options for exacting revenge, they had no options at all. Soleimani was irreplaceable. The only way to avenge his death would be to assassinate Trump himself.

Well, as it turns out, Iran was in the process of trying to do just that before Thomas Matthew Crooks took aim. “US authorities obtained intelligence from a human source in recent weeks on a plot by Iran to try to assassinate Trump, a development that led to the Secret Service increasing security around the former president in recent weeks,” CNN said Tuesday. Later, NBC reported the same, citing three US officials briefed on the plan.

The Iranian plot, US officials’ awareness of it and the additional security assets made available to Trump as a result, together “raise new questions about the lapses at the Saturday rally in Pennsylvania,” CNN remarked. (Indeed.)

According to an official who spoke to the network, everyone, including the Secret Service detail lead for Trump, was aware of the Iranian threat before Saturday’s event. “Secret Service surged resources” for Trump’s protection, the same official said.

A spokeswoman for the National Security Council reminded NBC that the government’s been tracking Iranian threats against Trump administration officials “for years.” In August of 2022, you might recall, the DoJ unveiled an IRGC murder plot against John Bolton. Mike Pompeo’s been targeted too, and Robert O’Brien had to walk around with a security detail for quite a while.

If you’re wondering, US officials don’t think Thomas Crooks was an Iranian spy. He certainly doesn’t (didn’t, past tense) look the part, I’ll say that.

The NSC left little doubt as to Iran’s motive: They’re still mad about Qassem. “These threats arise from Iran’s desire to seek revenge for the killing of Qassem Soleimani,” the NSC said Tuesday.

As The New York Times put it, somewhat dryly, “whatever additional measures were taken” in light of the Iranian threat “did not stop a 20-year-old local man from clambering on top of a nearby warehouse roof to shoot at Mr. Trump, coming close to killing him.”

If there was an IRGC operative hiding among the throng of MAGAs on July 13 in Butler, he must’ve been pretty surprised to see Crooks up on that shed: “Wait, who the hell is this guy?!”