Iranian state television aired a video this week offering a $10 million reward to anyone who kills Barron Trump, the 20-year-old son of President Donald Trump. The roughly three-minute segment ran on Channel 3 and was produced by media tied to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It carried the title “Where and how should we kill Barron Trump?”
The footage claimed to track Barron’s daily movements. It showed locations he has been, including Trump Tower and his university campus. The New York Post reported that the narrator described his movements as “fully monitored.”
The U.S. Secret Service has not commented on the video. It provides full-time protection to the immediate family of a sitting president, and when an earlier clip targeting Melania Trump surfaced in July it said it investigates anything that can be perceived as a threat to its protectees.
The claim about the bounty could not be independently verified. The video leans hard on stylized graphics and offers no proof that anyone has actually gotten close to Barron.
What the video claimed to know
The segment named two of Barron’s classmates. One, “Liam Carter,” appears to be a fake profile. The other, Bo Loudon, is a conservative social media influencer and a known friend of Barron’s. The video also said Secret Service agents disguised themselves as students on his campus to blend into the crowd around him.
It claimed to have found Barron’s online gaming accounts on Xbox, Discord, and FIFA, plus accounts belonging to people in his circle. The video said Barron talks privately through voice and text on Xbox, away from his security team.
One claim stood out for its detail. The video said a girl had slipped past the Secret Service, sat with Barron in a private meeting, and passed information back to the people who made the program. One account of the broadcast said the reward would double if a woman carried out the attack.
The narrator ended with a pitch aimed at gamers. “Millions of FIFA players against Trump are waiting to receive a ten-million-dollar prize from us.”
Melania was the target first
The Barron video copied the format of one put out in late July by the IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency, aimed at First Lady Melania Trump. That earlier video was titled “Where to Kill Melania?!”
It focused on the stores she shops at in New York and called her interest in fashion a “weak point.” It named three of her stylists, gave what it said was the code name her detail uses for her, and described the emergency evacuation routes prepared for her shopping trips. The makers said the information came from several unnamed security networks.
That video ended by pointing straight at her son. “This is just the beginning! Barron Trump, wait for us!” The line told anyone watching that the next one was already on the way.
A shift from officials to family
For years, Iranian state media and rallies have carried threats against American leaders and the officials who set policy on Iran. Pointing the cameras at a college student who holds no government job is a break from that pattern.
The threats are not confined to television screens. U.S. prosecutors charged a member of the Revolutionary Guards in 2022 with plotting to kill former national security adviser John Bolton. The Justice Department said that plot was likely retaliation for the January 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.
Commentators on Iranian state TV have framed the campaign through qisas, an Islamic concept of retributive justice. Mohammad-Javad Larijani called qisas the Islamic Republic’s “inalienable right.” Another regular, Mohsen Ghanbarian, said that without qisas against Trump, the country’s leaders “will always have to live in hiding.”
What set this off
The tone from Tehran changed after February 28, when U.S.-Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei along with a long list of senior military and political figures. Calls for revenge have run through hardline messaging nearly every day since.
Hundreds of thousands attended Khamenei’s funeral in July, chanting against the United States and Israel. Mourners carried a “#KillTrump” banner and hanged an effigy of the president, and the event’s official master of ceremonies led a chant calling for his killing. The rhetoric has climbed steadily as the war has dragged on, with the president’s family now written into the scripts.
The head of the Revolutionary Guards, Ahmad Vahidi, praised state television’s performance in the war, in a message to the broadcaster’s chief, calling it a “valuable effort” and “effective role-playing.” That praise is part of what gives the Barron video weight. This is not some fringe outlet. It is the state’s own broadcaster, cheered on by its top military commander.
Trump’s response and the pressure on Iran
Trump has said any attempt on his own life would bring a heavy answer. On January 20 he said that “anything ever happens, the whole country is going to get blown up,” and that he had given “very firm instructions” to “wipe them off the face of this Earth” if the threats were carried out.
On August 24 the president spent the day talking about money rather than the threat to his son. He posted on Truth Social that Iran is “completely collapsing.” The post landed as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent prepared new sanctions on Tehran, part of a campaign Trump has branded an “economic D-Day.” Writing in the Financial Times, Bessent called the measures “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary.”
The security around the family has already tightened. On July 8, leaving Ankara after the NATO summit, Trump was moved off Air Force One and flown home on a separate military jet, a switch he said was decided by the military and the Secret Service. The traveling press and some White House officials were not told, and believed he was aboard the decoy aircraft. A senior administration official said the move followed intelligence that an Iranian cell had entered Turkey with a shoulder-fired missile. The episode became public in August.
How much of it is real
The bounty on Barron cannot be confirmed, and nobody has shown that a real plot against him exists. The graphics look like something built in an editing suite, not evidence of surveillance. No U.S. intelligence agency has put out a public warning backing up what the video claims.
The Jerusalem Post could not even find the original clip on Channel 3’s own platforms, and worked instead from a link posted by Niyak Ghorbani, an anti-regime Iranian journalist based in London.
What is not in doubt is where the video came from and who blessed it. A government broadcaster ran a segment telling millions of people how to find and kill a 20-year-old, then dressed it up with a cash figure and a gamer’s incentive. Whether or not there is a real plot behind it, the message was the point.
The Secret Service has said nothing about this one. Barron keeps his full detail as the son of a sitting president. And the pattern from Tehran now runs through the whole family, from the First Lady’s shopping habits to a college kid’s FIFA account.
