For the first months of the U.S.-Iran war, President Donald Trump insisted his forces—and Israel’s—fight by the book. That meant adhering to what one commentator called the “Queensbury rules” of warfare, with limits on who could be targeted and how. But a recent Iranian propaganda video targeting a member of the Trump family has changed that calculus, with the president now officially removing the gloves and declaring Tehran’s leadership fair game, according to a report in American Thinker.
The shift comes after a year of escalating conflict. The war between the U.S. and Iran began on February 28, and from the start Israel coordinated closely with American forces. Israel’s strategy was bold from the outset: its first air strike eliminated Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. By April, as ceasefire talks got underway through third-party mediators, Israel had set its sights on two of Iran’s top remaining officials—Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.
But President Trump, according to the report, was initially uneasy with that plan. He feared that killing the two negotiators would scuttle the ceasefire talks and re-ignite full-scale fighting. At his request, Israel pulled back its bullseye from Araghchi and Ghalibaf.
That restraint, however, appears to have been met with anything but reciprocity from Tehran.
The video that changed everything
In recent weeks, Iranian state television aired a propaganda video titled “Where to kill Barron Trump?”—a direct threat against the president’s son. The video was just the latest in a pattern of intimidation targeting the First Family. A month earlier, Iran released a video instructing extremists on how to target First Lady Melania Trump, exposing what it called her “weaknesses” and warning, “Barron, wait for us.”
The mullahs, seemingly undeterred by the destruction of much of their air force, navy, and economy, went a step further with the Barron video: they offered a $10 million reward to anyone who succeeded in killing him.
According to American Thinker, these actions have triggered a fundamental reset in President Trump’s mindset. No longer is he focused on observing the traditional laws of warfare against an adversary that shows no such restraint. He has now publicly declared Iran’s leadership fair game.
A long history of Israeli reach
Israel, for its part, has long recognized that fighting Iran’s mullahs requires discarding the rulebook, the report notes. The evidence is in the near misses of Iran’s parliament speaker. Ghalibaf came close to death on two separate occasions in 2025, both times needing to be pulled from the rubble of Israeli air strikes. One of those strikes hit a “secret” meeting Iranian officials were holding in an underground bunker—a location they had every reason to believe was safe.
The message from those strikes, and now from Trump’s policy reversal, is clear: if Iran insists on targeting the president’s family, then no Iranian official can consider themselves beyond reach.
As American Thinker put it, the U.S. has finally come to accept a principle Israel recognized long ago—a fair fight against the mullahs means tossing all rules out the window.
Whether this tougher posture will push Tehran back to the negotiating table—or drive it further into defiance—remains to be seen. But for now, the gloves are off, and the stakes could not be higher.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/08/iran-s-mullahs-time-to-take-the-gloves-off/