Are Foreign Intelligence Agencies and Criminals Killing Donald Trump’s Enemies to Earn His Favor.
The Quiet Dismantling of America's Defenses Against Foreign Assassination on U.S. Soil
Note from the author: Last year I invited my mother to begin writing on Substack, because I think she is brilliant, tough, and incredibly thoughtful. So, if you aren’t following W. A. Lawrence, consider checking her work out. I think it makes a fantastic companion to The Existentialist Republic as she explores psychology, history, and how that understanding can help us more effectively navigate this moment in history.
Now to our regularly scheduled content, I hope you find it orienting and of use.
Chris
The questions of the hour:
Do you think U.S. President Donald Trump would like to see his political enemies murdered?
Would he remove institutional safeguards to make this more likely to happen?
And most importantly, if the first is true and the second has been effectively accomplished, what does that say about the current state of American democracy?
The means exist: foreign governments have hired killers to murder people on American soil, and juries have convicted the men they hired. Those governments have wanted their critics dead for decades, Freedom House counts 1,375 incidents across 107 countries in the last eleven years, so the governments’ motive predates Trump and continues without him.
Trump’s own motive is self-enrichment, pettiness, revenge, and power, and the evidence is his own words and actions.
The opportunity is what Trump created in office. He protected the crown prince who ordered the Khashoggi killing, said so to Bob Woodward, and the Saudi relationship improved; he’s named his enemies and withdrawn their security details while active threats against them persisted; and since January 2025 his administration has disbanded, narrowed, or reduced the federal offices that would detect such killings, and the offices that remain answer to him.
The evidence laid out here is enough for a state attorney general to start investigating, because starting an investigation takes far less evidence than convicting someone, and juries can lawfully convict on means, motive, and opportunity alone.
Means, motive, and opportunity are the categories of circumstantial evidence a prosecutor uses to establish who committed an act. Jury instructions direct jurors to treat circumstantial and direct evidence alike; the Supreme Court settled that in Holland v. United States in 1954, and prosecutors win murder cases without a body on those categories alone.
Trump wouldn’t need to arrange anything. Foreign governments already kill their critics inside the United States, and juries have convicted the people they hired.
Iran paid two high-ranking members of a Russian criminal organization five hundred thousand dollars to shoot the journalist Masih Alinejad at her home in Brooklyn; a federal jury in Manhattan convicted both men in March 2025. An Indian national pleaded guilty in February 2026 to plotting to assassinate a United States citizen in New York City at the direction of an Indian government employee.
Kill for a government Trump provides no aid. His enmity is tied to who pays him, same as his fealty.
Saudi Arabia murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the Istanbul consulate in October 2018, and the declassified American intelligence assessment states that Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation to capture or kill him. Congress passed a law requiring release of the assessment naming who was responsible, and Trump’s administration refused to release it for the rest of his term. He told Bob Woodward, for the book Rage: “I saved his ass. I was able to get Congress to leave him alone,” and said he’d gotten them to stop. Asked whether the crown prince ordered the killing, he answered with what the Saudis buy from us, citing more than a hundred billion in arms purchases.
Freedom House counts 1,375 such incidents by 54 governments in 107 countries between 2014 and 2025. Narendra Modi described the practice in a campaign speech: “Today, India no longer sends a dossier [to request extradition], it kills enemies inside their house.”
On November 18, 2025, Trump received the crown prince at the White House with a red carpet and a mounted honor guard, announced an arms deal, and answered a reporter’s question about the murder: “Things happen. But he knew nothing about it,” adding that the matter could be left there. The American intelligence assessment states the opposite. He called the crown prince’s record “incredible in terms of human rights” while his family business discussed a real estate deal with the Saudi government.
Every government named above watched it happen. A crown prince ordered the killing of an American resident, the president protected him, and the relationship improved.
The specialists who track these operations say other governments have noticed. Nate Schenkkan, who built the Freedom House dataset and names impunity as the first reason the numbers have grown, writes that this administration is reducing the role of the United States as a safe haven for dissidents and emboldening authoritarian actors to seek cooperation with it against them. Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab told the Canadian House of Commons in March 2026 that the American turn will normalize state repression and embolden dictators who now have a model, and that the Justice Department, once nominally independent of the executive, has become a weapon in the administration’s arsenal.
John Bolton said the precondition existed before Trump returned to office, on 60 Minutes in November 2023: “Well, I think we have lost deterrence.” Alinejad, in that segment: “They can challenge U.S. government on U.S. soil without any punishment.”
Trump names his enemies in public, and he’s withdrawn federal security details from four of them. The State Department had been guarding Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook around the clock because Iran had threatened to kill them over the Soleimani strike. Bolton lost his detail too. When Pete Hegseth pulled Mark Milley’s security, intelligence assessments had concluded that an active threat against Milley’s life persisted.
Trump controls every federal agency that would investigate, and the changes have dates. The Intelligence Community’s Annual Threat Assessment covered transnational repression in 2024, naming assassinations and abductions on American soil; the 2025 and 2026 assessments don’t discuss it at all.
Pam Bondi disbanded the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Foreign Influence Task Force in February 2025 and narrowed the standard for charging foreign agents. By March 2026, former officials described the counterespionage section as losing its experienced attorneys; that unit prosecuted the Iran and China cases.
And Intelligence Community Directive 191 obligates the intelligence agencies to warn people of credible threats to their lives, but whether that still happens at prior volume is unknown. When the Knight First Amendment Institute sued for the Khashoggi warning records, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence all refused to confirm or deny holding any.
Removing the capacity to find something is itself evidence; lawyers call it spoliation. The maxim is omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem, all things are presumed against the destroyer, and courts apply it so that a party gains nothing by destroying proof.
Civil juries receive an adverse inference instruction, and jurors can conclude that the missing evidence was unfavorable to whoever destroyed it. Criminal courts admit the same conduct as consciousness of guilt. Federal Rule of Evidence 804(b)(6) applies the principle directly: a defendant who makes a witness unavailable forfeits the right to object when that witness’s statements are admitted anyway, and doesn’t benefit from an absence he created.
Prosecutions didn’t stop. The Federal Bureau of Investigation still lists 2026 cases on its own transnational repression page, and Bondi wrote her reason into the memo: weaponization and abuse of prosecutorial discretion. A reader can take the shutdown as retaliation for the Manafort and Flynn prosecutions rather than as concealment, or as indifference, something less than either: the same removals with nobody having decided anything in particular.
And Schenkkan, whose dataset this article cites, declines in a footnote to claim the practice has increased at all, because his numbers come from public reporting, and a rise in the count can mean more reporters looking rather than more incidents occurring. That’s why no number exists.
I wrote this to lay out the landscape, because a country where the head of state’s enemies can be killed with impunity has moved past the point where the usual warnings apply. That country is so far from a free and fair republic or democracy that the titles become a problem, leaving us clinging to a strategic environment that has passed us by. If we can’t honestly acknowledge where we are then we can never defeat the existential threat that is fascism.
Plenty of killing is already public. Black and brown people and activists of all colors are assaulted, abducted, and murdered daily within our borders, killed by ICE agents and police.
Tens of thousands of people are also in internment camps without a trial or legal counsel. Political dissidents abroad are dead, and the families of political dissidents abroad murdered with them, along with schools full of children, as well as people who get in the way of US financial interests, all murdered using weapons paid for by the American taxpayer.
Thousands of dollars per year from all our paychecks for mass incarceration, GOP MAGA goon squads, mass surveillance, enriching billionaires, and the harassment and mass murder of innocent people worldwide.
But we can do something about it. We can do plenty. There is no force in human history more powerful than the power of the masses. The public. The “We” in “We The People.”
If you want to do something to move the world towards justice you can participate in the call to action below and after that check out our free Existentialist Republic Effective Activism Library at the bottom of this page.
Just so you know, we need 10 paid subscribers per article to keep this machine destroying fascism. We have not hit that number in 28 of the last 30 days despite robust readership and engagement. Don’t let it be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can subscribe then you’re the reason the lights stay on for millions of activist readers!
THE CALL TO ACTION
Category: Epstein Prosecutions
Difficulty Rating: 2/10. One email in your own words, ten minutes.
Who you are contacting: your state attorney general and/or your governor. Find your attorney general at naag.org/find-my-ag and your governor at nga.org/governors. Phone calls, letters, faxes, and constituent contact forms are all great options as well and engaging in multiple is a force multiplier, as is inviting friends to come over to join you for pizza video games, and 5 minutes of activism.
What to say: ask your attorney general to open an investigation into whether Epstein’s trafficking operation crossed into your state and violated your state’s criminal statutes. That’s what an investigation is for, finding out; an investigation isn’t a conviction, and opening one requires no proof up front, and you have a right to know the answer. The redacted federal release isn’t the evidence, it’s the reason to go get the evidence: victims, witnesses, flight logs, and bank records exist outside whatever the federal government blacked out. Three foreign governments opened criminal investigations off that release; no American state has. A state needs no federal referral, and no president can pardon a state conviction.
Your own words are best, kept plain and concise. Just saay who you are (profession), where you live (city), and why you care (your reason). Form letters get counted once and filed; so your own words are what matter because they come from the heart. If you need help feel free to comment in the comment section of this or any ER article and other activists in this community will help!
And tell them this if/when they follow up: if the response is a form letter, or them saying they have no power, or a non-answer bragging about civil suits rather than criminal prosecutions of this administration’s lawlessness, let them know that you see what choice for they are making in this moment of crisis. It’s that simple, just speak from the heart.
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It's a terrifying situation but yes. It is not an unlikely possibility because why else would you remove security from people who have served this nation?
Security should be a non-partisan issue.
No person in leadership or out of leadership should be a target for harassment or murder whether you like them or not.
This should be a democracy of decency and respect for the sanctity of people's well-being, including those who have served in government and ordinary citizens including undocumented individuals.
Yet, we have entered a potential unthinkable shitstorm of retaliation and retribution.
Just look where we are. Nothing seems out of bounds at this moment in history.
What about Ivana’s “fall” to her death? I’ve suspected murder from that all along. She could have made a comment, even to one of the kids, that could have made trump feel threatened.