What did Donald Trump do today?
He sided with Iran in a cyberattack against the United States.
Earlier this week, more than 30 municipal water systems in Minnesota were targeted by a cyberattack that US intelligence officials believe came from Iran. Those agencies have been warning about the likelihood of such attacks for weeks now. No serious damage was done, but the fact that it took place on American soil represented an escalation by Iran as the war enters its sixth month, because of the implication that Iran is rising to Trump's own threats to target civilian populations.
Trump's response was to defend Iran, saying that he thought the problem—dozens of simultaneous alarms and malfunctions at independent water facilities across the state—was somehow the fault of Minnesota's government. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, and Trump has been targeting the state ever since with punitive quasi-military occupations and illegal cuts to its Medicaid program.
"We heard in Minnesota there was a cyberattack and they blame it on Iran. I don't think so. I think, I blame it on Minnesota because they're grossly incompetent," Trump said during a Cabinet meeting.
Q: Can you rule out that Iran is behind the water attacks? TRUMP: I don't think so. I think that Minnesota is behind it. You know who is behind it? Minnesota. Because they're grossly incompetent. I don't think there was an Iranian cyberattack. I think Minnesota ought to get its act together.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) July 31, 2026 at 11:29 AM
[image or embed]
Again, the "they" blaming Iran is the United States intelligence community—or what is left of it.
The federal government is primarily responsible for defending public and private infrastructure from cyberattacks. Trump's limited understanding of "the cyber" is legendary: among other things, he once seriously suggested bike messengers as a more secure means of transferring data, touted his then-10-year-old son Barron as a computer expert, and instantly agreed to an offer from Vladimir Putin to form a joint cybersecurity task force. (Russia is, of course, the main cybersecurity threat to the United States.)
And, as Gov. Walz pointed out, Trump's DOGE attack on basic government functions severely compromised the nation's cybersecurity. Not only was some of the most sensitive data put directly into the unsupervised hands of unvetted teenagers picked for their political loyalty, but Trump deliberately slashed the budget of the main cybersecurity agency, CISA, in retaliation for its director saying that the 2020 election Trump lost was not tampered with.
Trump knows—or at least could know—more about the attack than the general public does at the moment, so it's not clear if Iran deliberately chose to target the Americans Trump thinks of as enemies to provoke exactly this reaction. But it's not that hard to believe: Iran has made trolling Trump personally a key weapon in its arsenal as it seeks to prolong the conflict on its own terms.
Incredibly, this is not even close to the first time that Trump has defended hostile countries, including Iran, for launching attacks against the United States. He brushed off evidence that the Putin regime was helping Iran target attacks that killed four Americans earlier this month. He did the same when Putin was caught offering bounties on murdering American troops in Afghanistan. He gave Iran "permission" to launch a retaliatory attack against a US base in Qatar last year—after it was too late to do anything about it.
Trump even defended Iran's right to develop a ballistic missile program last month, during the current war, because, he said, it wouldn't be "fair" otherwise.
Why does this matter?
- Defending an enemy you're currently fighting a war with so that you can try to score political points against Americans is about as much patriotism and love of country as you'd expect from Trump at this point.