‘We’re Gonna Blow It to Smithereens’: Trump Threatens to Annihilate Iran After Reports of Assassination Attempt
Former President Donald Trump ostensibly threatened retaliation against Iran following reports that the Islamic Republic has conspired assassination attempts against him as he runs for President in 2024.
US intel officials have briefed the former president about a suspected Iranian plot to kill him, his campaign has revealed. The Guardian reports:
The briefing, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), is believed to have focused on a scheme unrelated to two failed domestic assassination attempts against the Republican nominee for president, and came amid reports suggesting that Iran is conducting an ongoing hack against Trump’s campaign.
Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s spokesperson, said the briefing concerned “real and specific threats from Iran to assassinate [Trump] in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States”.
He added: “Intelligence officials have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months, and law enforcement officials across all agencies are working to ensure President Trump is protected and the election is free from interference.”
Trump addressed this during a rally in Mint Hill, North Carolina, on Wednesday afternoon. During his remarks, Trump called himself the “leading candidate” and suggested that if he were sitting president and he was made aware of similar reports, he would “blow them to smithereens.”
Trump said:
But if I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We’re going to blow it to smithereens. You can’t do that. And there would be no more threats. There would be no more threats. But right now, we don’t have that leadership or the necessary people, the necessary leaders. We have two people, not one. We don’t even know who our president is right now.
Who is our president right now? We really don’t know. But we have two people, not one that only keep looking. And when you do that, when you just look, trouble always ensues. So it’s big trouble for our country. Meanwhile, we have the president of Iran in our country this week. We have large security forces guarding him, and yet they’re threatening our former president and the leading candidate to become the next president of the United States. Certainly a strange set of circumstances around the world.
Our enemies are desperate to prevent Donald Trump from returning to the White House because they know.
CNN’s Jim Acosta characterized Trump’s comments shortly after pulling out of the rally, saying, “He was commenting on some of these threats from Iran that have been identified by intelligence officials in the U.S. government that their Iranian interests may be thinking about going after former President Trump.”
“Trump said if something like that were to occur, cities in Iran would be blown to smithereens, I believe were the words he was using there,” Acosta continued. “He did go on to describe the way he characterizes things inside the White House right now, that there are two presidents right now. Obviously, that is not true. But obviously, we’re going to be talking about these comments that he’s making, basically issuing a threat to Iran.”
Later in the segment, former Biden White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield correctly noted Trump was threatening a “hot war” in the Middle East, which stands apart from the “anti-war” or “president of peace” image that Trump has tried to run on.
Watch above via CNN.
