Trump Orders Drone Strike Killing Iran's Top General Soleimani, Bringing U.S. to Brink of War

The Strike

Shortly after 12:30 a.m. local time on January 3, 2020, a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone fired Hellfire missiles into a two-vehicle convoy leaving Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani and nine other people, including Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces 1. Soleimani was the head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and one of the most powerful figures in the Iranian government. The U.S. had not killed a foreign government official of comparable stature in modern memory.

Trump ordered the strike from Mar-a-Lago. He notified neither Congress, nor most of his own national-security team, nor the Iraqi government on whose sovereign territory he had just conducted an assassination. Within hours, Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all U.S. forces from the country in protest 1.

The “Imminent Threat” That Wasn’t

To justify a strike of this magnitude, Trump and his cabinet stood up an “imminent threat” rationale. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed Soleimani was plotting “a big action” against American lives. Trump went further: on Fox News on January 10, he asserted that Soleimani had been targeting “four embassies” for attack 3.

Within days, the story collapsed.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper — the man whose intelligence apparatus would have surfaced any such plot — went on CBS’s Face the Nation and publicly contradicted his own president. Esper said he “didn’t see” any intelligence supporting the four-embassies claim and said he assumed Trump was relaying his personal “belief” that embassies “could have been” targets 3. A two-page White House memo to Congress, released through the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made no mention of an imminent threat at all. Instead it framed the killing as retaliation for previous attacks and a deterrent against future ones — a fundamentally different (and legally weaker) justification than the one Trump had given the public 4. House Foreign Affairs Chair Eliot Engel said the memo “directly contradicts the president’s false assertion.”

In other words: Trump assassinated a foreign government official, then lied to the country about why.

Iran Retaliates, Trump Calls TBI “Headaches”

On January 8, 2020, Iran’s IRGC fired more than a dozen ballistic missiles at U.S. positions at al-Asad Airbase in western Iraq and at a base in Erbil. The Trump administration initially announced that “no Americans were harmed” 5.

That, too, was false.

By the end of January, the Pentagon disclosed that at least 50 U.S. service members had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries from the strike. Two weeks later, the count rose to 109 5. Subsequent peer-reviewed medical research found that the affected personnel showed statistically significant impairments in attention and cortical function consistent with blast-related neurological injury. Asked about the wounded troops, Trump dismissed their injuries as “headaches” and “not very serious,” prompting public condemnation from veterans’ groups including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, who demanded an apology that never came.

What It Set in Motion

The Soleimani strike did not, on January 3, start a regional war. But it set the precedent. It established as routine the idea that an American president can — on his own personal authority, from a Florida resort, without congressional authorization or even consultation — order the targeted killing of a senior foreign government official, lie about the legal basis, and then trivialize the U.S. casualties when the retaliation comes.

Iraq’s expulsion vote weakened the U.S. position in the Middle East. The strike accelerated Iran’s withdrawal from the remaining provisions of the JCPOA nuclear deal that Trump himself had already torn up in 2018. And the precedent that an Article II “commander-in-chief” authority can absorb war-making powers Congress alone is supposed to hold became part of the operating doctrine of the executive branch.

Six years later, in 2026, that same operating doctrine would underwrite Trump’s launch of Operation Epic Fury — the open-ended bombing campaign inside Iran that the United States is still prosecuting today. The Soleimani strike was not an outlier. It was the template.