Taking a break from the outrageous ‘Haitians in Springfield, Ohio stealing and eating cats and dogs’ story, former President Donald Trump turned to foreign policy in North Carolina, bluntly warning Iran of the consequences of assassinating him and the “leading” candidate in the November 2024 election.
The dire missive to Teheran came after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) met with Trump campaign which has been passed off by staffers as a meeting that discussed “real and specific threats” from Iran to assassinate the 45th President with a view to destabilising and sowing seeds of chaos in America. The ODNI has however declined to discuss details of the briefing.
“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,” the former president said. “There would be no more threats. But right now, we don’t have that leadership or the necessary people, the necessary leaders,” he added.
Iran focus
Iran has been on the radar since the first assassination attempt on Trump this July followed by the second alleged attempt on September 15. It has been reported that intelligence had been received of alleged Iranian plots that have been dismissed as “malicious” by Teheran.
Both incidents at Pennsylvania and West Palm Beach are under active investigation with multiple agencies constantly briefing Congressional leaders. The ongoing threats were not “encouraging” but also “not a five alarm fire”, Republican Senator Josh Hawley has been quoted.
But Iran has been in the news for quite some time now especially the linkages to the former President. In January 2020 Trump ordered a drone strike that took out Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the leaders of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. And Teheran vowed revenge that is still considered active but at a time of Iran’s time and place of choice.
In the context of 2024 Presidential election, American intelligence has been speaking about Iranian hackers seriously engaged and the Biden team even receiving some material retrieved from the Trump campaign which apparently was not used.
Trump rap for FBI
Trump’s direct anger is against Iran but also some of it has been directed against domestic investigative agencies, especially the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for a perceived lack of momentum in ongoing investigations.
The lament has been that the FBI has been unable to break open foreign based apps that could shed light on the July and September attempts. “They break into apps all the time. They had no problem breaking into the apps of the J6 hostages. They broke into those apps… And they could be Iran-based, they could also be something else. But we’ll never know until they are opened, and they’ve got to get them opened”, the former President maintained. J6 refers to the Capitol Hill rioters arrested on January 6, 2021 that Trump routinely calls hostages.
There is another context to this “macho” talk on Iran going back to the 1979 hostages crisis with some in the Grand Old Party still believing that it was President Ronald Reagan’s tough image and the perceived consequences that eventually brought the 52 Americans home on inauguration day in 1981.
But there are others who make the point that the deal for hostages was sealed long before Reagan’s inauguration but Teheran wanted to deny President Jimmy Carter the moment as a payback for letting the Shah of Iran to land on American soil in October 1979 for medical treatment.
The writer is a senior journalist who has reported from Washington DC on North America and United Nations.