Former President Donald Trump said Wednesday he would threaten to “blow Iran to smithereens” if he returned to the White House and any candidate received threats from Tehran. The comments came after his campaign said it had been briefed on alleged Iranian assassination threats against Trump.
“If I were president, I would tell the country that is threatening, in this case Iran, if they do anything to harm this man, we will blow their greatest cities and the country to smithereens. We are going to blow them to smithereens,” Trump said at a campaign event in North Carolina.
The Republican candidate thanked Democrats for working with their Republican counterparts to pass a bill to increase Secret Service protection. The Senate advanced the bill, which passed the House unanimously last week, on Tuesday, sending it to President Biden's desk to await his signature.
Trump said he would take further action if he were in the White House.
“But right now, we don't have that leadership, we don't have the people that we need, we don't have the leaders that we need,” Trump said, appearing to criticize Biden.
The former president was grazed by a bullet in July assassinations attempted at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. This month, another suspect was indicted for allegedly plotting to assassinate Trump on a golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida. The suspects in both cases were US citizens.
“You know, there have been two assassination attempts on me, as far as we know. Iran may have been involved, but I'm not sure,” Trump speculated at a campaign event on Wednesday.
The Trump campaign said Tuesday that the former president had been briefed by intelligence officials about the suspected assassination attempts by Iran, broadly referring to a “persistent and systematic” threat.
The Republican candidate Authentic Social Posts Earlier in the day, he said: “Iran has already tried and it didn't work, but they will try again.”
“Meanwhile, this week we have the president of Iran visiting us with a massive security force guarding him, and they are threatening our former president and the leading candidate to be the next president of the United States,” Trump said.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian spoke at the annual session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week.
Trump's visit comes amid signs that the battleground is tilting Democrats in North Carolina, where polls have shown him and Harris roughly neck and neck.
The former president, who has touted his proposal to use tariffs to boost U.S. manufacturing, addressed voters at the Mossack Group facility in Mint Hill.
