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This is the motte, a site for rationally discussing heterodox opinions, some well outside the Overton window. We have Holocaust deniers, people who want to disenfranchise Blacks, or women, all kinds of witches. "Your argument shows that you are a terrible person and you should feel bad for making it" is not generally considered a valid counterargument. You are arguing backwards, "of course, assassinating Trump is evil, therefore whatever the assassin believed must be wrong." You did not engage with my steelman (which is mostly not the reasoning of the would-be assassin, from what I can tell) at all.
Now, you could certainly argue that humans should never kill other humans without due process unless these humans are evil on the scale of Hitler. But then you would have to consider Trump a murderer as well.
The Ayatollah was very much not Hitler. He was the leader (or figurehead) of a system which recently killed some 6500--36500 people (estimate range on WP), plus perhaps a thousand a year in executions and extrajudicial killings. I would estimate the total deaths during his tenure to be less than a 100k, so perhaps three milli-Hitlers. I am not crying over his violent end, though I would argue that it would have been better not to kill him for utilitarian reasons.
Unfortunately, Trump has killed a lot of people with a death toll far lower than the Ali Khamenei as well. Take his strategy of sinking suspected drug-smuggling boats and killing any survivors. The median person on a drug-smuggling boat (charitably assuming that the identification of the US is indeed correct) is not some drug kingpin who has ordered the deaths of dozens. He is likely to be some sailor who found that he can work three times as much working smuggling drugs than he can working on a fishing boat. Sure, cocaine kills (though rarely through murder), and he directly profits from that, but few would argue that he would deserve summary execution for it. (As an intuition pump, consider a US worker who helped manufacture the bombs which hit the Minab school. He knowingly profited from manufacturing a device which he knew had a substantial chance to kill innocents, when he could have opted to find a less convenient job instead. If a sailor on a drug-smuggling boat deserves summary execution for profiting from drug deaths, it seems hard to argue how the bomb factory worker does not deserve summary execution as an accessory to murder.)
Trump certainly did away with the theory that the lives of heads of state should be considered to have more intrinsic worth than the lives of other people, and for once I agree with him (though utilitarian sadly considerations apply, as mentioned). The fact that he is a head of state does not increase the intrinsic worth of his life over that of some Hispanic sailor or Iranian school girl. If an ordinary person blew up ~170 school girls through recklessness, we would call that depraved heart murder and lock him up for life. Trump has certainly ordered the intentional killing of people who had 100 times less blood on their hands than himself.
There are certainly ways out of this dilemma. For example, you could say that actually, a foreigner is worth only a millionth part of a US citizen, which should suffice plenty -- at least if we only consider violence, and not the deaths resulting from cutting USAID in half. Or you could say that officials are allowed to kill people, but then you will find your reason to blow up Khamenei gone. So you amend that they are allowed to kill people if you like their cause, but that does not seem very principled. Or perhaps you set some threshold, 'Let n be the number of people killed by an official, and k be the number of people he could have killed. If n/k>q, then that official is a vile monster who needs to be bombed, otherwise he is a respected statesman who did what the job required.'
Trump talks about bombing Iran 'for fun', and has made the threat to permanently destroy Iranian civilization overnight. If you really considered human life sacred, that would have upset you 90 million times as much as my steelman.
Trump said in the next sentence that he hoped it wouldn't happen. This is a steelman only as "the assassin is deluded about Trump, and having to kill Trump logically follows from his delusion".
... in the context of government actions. This no more justifies assassination than it justifies a Mafia shakedown because that's just like collecting taxes.
If this is a steelman, as opposed to your personal belief, you would think that it's an understandable argument, but still wrong. So what in your opinion is wrong with it?
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