As President Trump boasts about the pain he’s inflicting on Iran, Americans are discovering “violence has a way of breaking containment,” said Campbell Robertson and Tim Arango in The New York Times. On March 1, the war’s second day, a gunman wearing a T-shirt with Iranian flag colors opened fire outside a bar in Austin, killing three people and wounding 15. A week later, two ISIS-supporting teenagers from Pennsylvania tried to explode homemade bombs at a protest in New York City. And in the space of two hours last week, an ISIS supporter fatally shot an ROTC instructor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and a Lebanese American man rammed an explosive-laden truck into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., where 140 children were attending preschool. The attacker, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, was killed by security; his was the only death. There’s no evidence Iran directed any of these attacks. But faced with an existential threat, the regime in Tehran might activate “sleeper cells” and conduct assassinations, bombings, and cyber strikes in the U.S. The violence in the Middle East could also inspire more attacks by “lone offenders” like Ghazali, who went on the rampage after an Israeli air strike on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon killed four members of his family.
“Team Trump may be less ready to deal with” such threats “than previous administrations,” said Daniella Cheslow in Politico. It’s not just that the Department of Homeland Security is partially shut down, with Democrats refusing to fund the department unless there are meaningful immigration enforcement reforms. It’s also that former DHS secretary Kristi Noem slashed the staff at an intelligence office “that would ordinarily focus on the kind of threats posed by Iran.” Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center, which fuses intelligence about threats from across government, has shifted its focus under Trump toward drug cartels. And then there’s Kash Patel, said former FBI agent Jacqueline Maguire in The New York Times. The “sophomoric” FBI director has redirected counter-terrorism personnel to work on Trump’s migrant crackdown and purged scores of agents, including a dozen Iran specialists just days before the war. Their crime: taking part in past investigations of Trump.
The deeper problem is that terrorism has evolved, said Kevin Cohen in The Wall Street Journal. In the years after 9/11, security agencies focused on keeping foreign radicals from either entering the country or recruiting people already here. But in 2026, most terrorists are “made in the USA,” like last week’s attackers: U.S.-born or naturalized citizens who “self-radicalize” and who are near impossible to identify before they act. Not everything has changed, said The Free Press in an editorial. We don’t help ourselves by ignoring the truth that these terrorists share the same Islamist ideology that motivated the 9/11 hijackers. “A society that cannot name its enemies cannot protect itself against them.”
If demonizing Muslims were enough to keep us safe, Trump might be the perfect leader for this moment, said Jackie Calmes in the Los Angeles Times. But it isn’t, and he isn’t. The same “recklessness” that led Trump to launch a war with no clear goal or exit plan has left us effectively undefended from “retaliatory attacks.” Our security agencies have been gutted. The professionals who ran them have been replaced with “genuflecting enablers.” And they answer to a president who, when asked last week if he expected Iran-related terrorism on U.S. soil, could only reply with a shrug: “I guess.”
Violence linked to the war in Iran has hit American cities