Former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday suggested that Iran might have been behind the two assassination attempts against him even as officials have said there is no evidence to link those plots to Iranian threats.
Mr. Trump was briefed on Tuesday by intelligence officials about threats from Iran, his campaign said. U.S. intelligence agencies were tracking a potential Iranian assassination plot against him in the weeks before a gunman fired at him in July at his rally in Butler, Pa. But officials have found no evidence to link Iran to either the Pennsylvania gunman or the man who the authorities say tried to shoot Mr. Trump at his golf course in Florida this month.
Still, in a wide-ranging speech in North Carolina, Mr. Trump said the F.B.I. was moving too slowly to investigate both assassination attempts, including possible ties to Iran. “They may or may not involve, but possibly do, Iran,” Mr. Trump said. “But I don’t really know.”
Building on his yearslong effort to discredit federal investigations into him by contending that they are politically motivated, Mr. Trump argued that the F.B.I. was overly focused on him and on the “J6 hostages,” the name he has given to those arrested over their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
And though Mr. Trump has spent much of his campaign accusing President Biden of being a warmonger, he said that if he were president, he would have threatened military action against Iran if it had made similar threats.
“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,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump’s comments on the Iranian threats and the assassination attempts opened an hourlong speech at a manufacturer in Mint Hill, N.C., a suburb of Charlotte. Though the backdrop suggested he would focus on the economy, and he spent some time discussing his economic plans, Mr. Trump veered into foreign policy and immigration. He also revived grievances about the 2020 election and about his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
And after accusing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine of “making little nasty aspersions” about him, Mr. Trump spent eight minutes criticizing the war in the country. Describing the devastation at length, he appeared to blame Mr. Zelensky for continuing to fight a yearslong conflict that began when Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine.
Then, he directly faulted Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris for continuing to provide military aid to Ukraine. “A deal could have been made if we had a competent president instead of a president that egged it all on,” Mr. Trump said. “And Biden and Kamala allowed this to happen by feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before.”
Mr. Trump has insisted he would be able to end the war in Ukraine quickly, but he has offered no detail on how he might do so other than leveraging his relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. During a debate this month, he would not say whether he hoped for Ukraine’s victory. Mr. Zelensky has ruled out any settlement that does not restore his country’s original borders.
Much of Mr. Trump’s speech in Mint Hill repeated promises he made on Tuesday to restore U.S. manufacturing through a combination of corporate tax breaks and punitive tariffs. With Ms. Harris scheduled to discuss her economic policy after his speech, Mr. Trump labeled her a “tax queen” over her proposals not to extend all of his signature tax cuts and to raise the corporate tax.
And criticizing her opposition to tariffs, Mr. Trump invoked an apocalyptic vision of a world without the tariffs he imposed while president. “You wouldn’t have anything left in this state if I didn’t do what I did,” he said. “This building would now be shuttered, closed, empty, no jobs. And now it’s thriving.”
He also stoked fear around immigration, claiming that immigrants were taking over “hundreds of towns and cities throughout our country.” Repeating a baseless claim that other countries were deliberately sending criminals and the mentally ill to the border, Mr. Trump also continued to insist immigrants had conducted “hostile takeovers” in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colo.
Both places have become the focal points of false claims and exaggerations by Republicans eager to attack the Biden administration over its border policy.
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