U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to the media next to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 11, 2026.
Brian Snyder | Reuters
President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he’s not worried about Iran executing a terror attack within the United States in retaliation for the ongoing war by the U.S. and Israel.
“No, I don’t,” Trump told a reporter outside the White House when asked if he feared such a domestic attack.
Trump also touted progress in the war against Iran, which is in its 11th day, before departing for a trip to Kentucky and Ohio.
“Right now, they’ve lost their Navy, their Air Force. They have no anti-aircraft apparatus at all,” the president said. “Their leaders are gone, and we could do a lot worse.”
Trump said the U.S. military is “leaving certain things” in Iran, which could be destroyed by the afternoon, if need be, and “they literally would never be able to build that country back.”
Later in the day, Trump told reporters upon arrival at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland that the U.S. has located all Iranian “sleeper cells” — covert groups embedded in foreign countries that remain dormant until activated to carry out terror attacks.
“We know where Iranian ‘sleeper cells’ are … we have eyes on all of them,” Trump said, adding that the U.S. was “in very good shape” in its war on Iran, according to a Reuters feed of his statement.
The U.S. military had destroyed about 16 of Iran’s mine-layers, Trump said. Asked if Iran had mined the Strait of Hormuz, which is the world’s most sensitive choke point for oil shipments, Trump said, “We don’t think so.”
In a report Tuesday that cited two people familiar with U.S. intelligence reporting, CNN said that Iran began laying mines in the strait, albeit just a few dozen in recent days.
Trump, referring to the CEOs of major oil companies, said, “I think they should” send tankers through the narrow strait, which has remained effectively closed because of the war.
A spokesman for Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned Monday that tankers passing through the strait “must be very careful.”
The Strait of Hormuz, which lies off the southern coast of Iran, connects the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea.
The insurance giant Chubb said Wednesday that it will serve as lead underwriter for a U.S.-government-led program to provide insurance to ships passing through the strait.
Trump on Wednesday brushed off a question about a report by The New York Times, which said that “newly released video adds to the evidence that an American missile likely hit an Iranian elementary school where 175 people, many of them children, were reported killed.”
Trump said, “I don’t know about that” finding, which backs up other analyses that the U.S. military was responsible for that Feb. 28 attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school.
The president again criticized the leadership of Spain for not helping the U.S. war effort.
“We may cut off trade with Spain,” said Trump, who has a penchant for using tariffs and other retaliatory trade practices as leverage against other countries.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has incurred Trump’s wrath for barring the U.S. military from using two bases in Andalusia to launch strikes on Iran.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in an X post on Wednesday, wrote that in conversations with “the presidents of the governments of Russia and Pakistan, while announcing the Islamic Republic’s commitment to peace and tranquility in the region, I emphasized that the only way to end the war that began with the warmongering of the Zionist regime and America is the acceptance of Iran’s indisputable rights, payment of reparations, and a firm international obligation to prevent their aggression from recurring.”
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