Campaigning in North Carolina on Wednesday, former President Donald Trump said that if he was president and Iran was threatening a leading presidential candidate he would, in turn, threaten war and to bomb Iran “to smithereens.”

The remark came after Trump’s campaign was briefed on Iranian threats against the former president on Tuesday and as Trump says the country may “possibly” be involved in the two assassination attempts on his life in recent months, despite there being no public accusation by national security officials that Iran was involved in the plots.

“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,” Trump said, speaking from a plumbing parts manufacturer facility in Mint Hill, N.C.

Trump went on to note Iran’s newly elected President Masoud Pezeshkian was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly’s annual gathering and that “we have large security forces guarding him, and yet they are threatening our former president and the leading candidate to become the next president of the United States.”

U.S. intelligence officials confirmed to the Associated Press on Wednesday that they briefed Trump’s campaign on Iranian threats against the Republican presidential nominee, but declined to elaborate further. In a statement Tuesday, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the meeting included information about “real and specific” threats to “assassinate him in an effort to destabilize and sow chaos in the United States."

“I think you have to let them know, because the best way to do it is through the Office of the President, that you do any attacks on former presidents or candidates for president, your country gets blown to smithereens, as we say,” Trump reiterated.

Later in his speech, Trump boasted he kept the U.S. “out of wars” as president.

“My rhetoric kept you out of wars. I stopped wars from happening. If it were somebody else, they would have gotten five Nobel Prizes,” Trump said. “I never even got a mention.”

Authorities have made no connection between the attempts on Trump’s life and Iran.

In the first attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania in July, authorities shot and killed the gunman who shot Trump and people attending his rally. Law enforcement officials have said the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, searched online for events of both Trump and Biden, and viewed the Trump rally as a “target of opportunity. " The FBI has said it believes Crooks acted alone.

The suspect in the second assassination attempt, Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, was apprehended following a chase after the Secret Service spotted him lying in wait at Trump’s Florida golf course this month. Routh’s past social media posts don’t easily align with either party, but his views on Trump seemed to sour in recent years. The FBI said Routh wrote a letter detailing his plans to kill Trump.

But Iran has long targeted Trump after the Trump administration ordered the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020. This year, Iranian hackers stole information from Trump’s campaign and sought, unsuccessfully, to interest news organizations and President Joe Biden’s campaign in the material. In 2022, an Iranian operative was charged in a plot to murder former National Security Adviser John Bolton in presumed retaliation for Soleimani’s death.

And in July, authorities said they had received word of an Iranian threat on Trump’s life and boosted security for the candidate as a result. The following month, a Pakistani man alleged to have links to Iran was charged in a plot to carry out political assassinations on U.S. soil. Law enforcement did not name the targets of the alleged plot, but legal filings suggest Trump was a potential target.

Taking aim at Zelenskyy

Trump’s speech in North Carolina was billed as one centered on his policies to boost U.S. manufacturing and make the U.S. more economically competitive with China — a focus of his campaign in recent days — but Trump frequently veered off into other topics.

He insisted Harris is lying about working at McDonald’s in college and claimed he is planning to go “work the french fries” at a McDonald’s during the campaign “because I will have worked longer and harder at McDonald's than she did if I do that even for half an hour.” And he falsely claimed immigrants “with massive machine gun type equipment” that are “beyond even military” scope are conducting hostile takeovers of cities like Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colo. 

“It’s unbelievable. They’re literally taking over those towns, taking over… hundreds of towns and cities throughout our country, including the big ones,” Trump baselessly claimed. “They're taking over your cities, your big ones, your small ones, your towns. It's not sustainable.”

Trump added that he recently spoke with Tom Homan, the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 presidential transition plan. Homan told him, in Trump’s recollection, that the migrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border comes from 168 different countries.

“Most people don’t even know there are that many countries,” the Republican presidential nominee remarked. 

For much of the last 15 minutes of his 67-minute speech, Trump zeroed in on the war in Ukraine, pledging to “settle” it if reelected and laying the blame for Russia’s invasion at the feet of Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president visited a Pennsylvania ammunition factory this week and told the New Yorker that Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, “is too radical” and that his “feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how.”

“I think it's something we have to have a quick discussion about, because the president of Ukraine is in our country and he’s making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president, me,” Trump said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., demanded Zelenskyy fire his ambassador to the United States after the Pennsylvania trip, calling the tour of the factory in battleground Pennsylvania “a partisan campaign event designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference.” In an unrelated press call on Wednesday, Vance said the war “has distracted and consumed a lot of resources at a time when Americans are suffering” and claimed the war never would have happened if Trump was still president. 

Zelenskyy was set to meet with Trump during his time in the United States, but Politico reported on Wednesday morning that is now unlikely to happen. 

“It would have never happened if I were president to start off with and there didn't even have to be a settlement. It wouldn't have happened, period. Russia wouldn't have gone,” Trump said in North Carolina. “But what do you have left now? Three years of horrible fighting, the country is absolutely obliterated. Millions and millions of people, including all of these great soldiers, they're dead.”

He claimed Biden and Harris “egged it all on” by “feeding Zelenskyy money and munitions like no country has ever seen before.” Biden led global efforts to arm and finance Ukraine after Russia launched a massive invasion in February 2022 that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties and war crimes charges for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Every time he came to our country, he'd walk away with $60 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on Earth,” Trump said. “Ukraine is gone. It's not Ukraine anymore. You can never replace those cities and towns, and you can never replace the dead people, so many dead people.”

“There is really nothing for the Ukrainian people to move back to. And it didn't need to happen. Those buildings are down. Those cities are gone. They're gone and we continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal, Zelenskyy,” he added.

Zelenskyy was back in New York on Wednesday for an event at the United Nations with Biden and world leaders from more than 30 countries for the launch of a “joint declaration” that will commit those nations to helping support Ukraine’s post-war recovery and reconstruction. 

Biden and Harris are set to meet with Zelenskyy separately on Thursday at the White House. 

Biden campaigned heavily on unifying much of the world in backing Ukraine during the early days of the war and the Harris campaign has upped its efforts to woo Polish-Americans, many of whom hold historic animosity toward Russia and number in the hundreds of thousands in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.