More than 30 Minnesota water systems got hit by a coordinated cyberattack in late July, targeting the programmable logic controllers that remotely operate critical water infrastructure. Federal officials briefed Minnesota state and local leaders that Iran was the likely culprit. At least seven states reported similar attacks within the same week, per the FBI, and officials say the intrusions carried the hallmarks of Iranian hackers — consistent with a documented 2023 precedent, when hackers affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard breached identical water-system controllers at multiple U.S. facilities.
Trump’s response, at a Cabinet meeting at Camp David: “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.” He went further: “I think the governor’s behind it.” And further still, dismissing an active foreign adversary during an active war with that same adversary: “Iran should be so lucky. Iran’s got bigger problems than worrying about Minnesota.”
READ THAT ACCUSATION AGAIN
The sitting President of the United States, mid-cabinet meeting, floated — without a shred of offered evidence — that a sitting U.S. governor may have orchestrated a cyberattack on his own state’s water infrastructure. Not incompetence in responding to an attack. Being “behind” the attack itself. That’s not political rhetoric about a governor’s handling of a crisis. That’s an accusation of what would functionally amount to sabotage of critical infrastructure and endangerment of the public water supply — leveled at a political opponent, at a cabinet meeting, with nothing behind it beyond Trump’s own assertion.
WALZ’S RESPONSE — AND THE PART THAT’S HARDER TO DISMISS
Walz didn’t just deny it. He pointed to something specific and checkable: “Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too. This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.” He also connected it directly to a documented policy choice: “DOGE took an axe to CISA and left the U.S. exposed to cyber attacks. Thankfully, our experts in Minnesota were able to identify the vulnerability quickly and work with local communities to stop it.”
That’s a real, verifiable claim, not a deflection — DOGE’s cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been reported and documented independently of this specific incident. If Minnesota’s own state IT team caught and contained a suspected Iranian intrusion on critical infrastructure while the federal agency built specifically to prevent exactly this kind of attack had already been gutted, “grossly incompetent” is a strange label to apply to the state that actually stopped it, rather than to the federal cuts that made the intrusion more likely in the first place.
THE PATTERN THIS FITS
This isn’t Trump’s first attack on Walz or Minnesota specifically — he’s repeatedly gone after Walz over unrelated state social-services fraud allegations Walz himself has not been personally accused of participating in, and The New Republic’s reporting frames this latest attack as consistent with what it describes as the administration’s broader targeting of Minnesota’s large immigrant population. Whether or not you accept that broader framing, the specific pattern here is unmistakable: rather than accept his own intelligence agencies’ assessment that a foreign adversary attacked American infrastructure during an active war with that adversary, Trump chose instead to publicly accuse a domestic political opponent of doing it to himself — a claim that, if taken seriously, would be a genuinely alarming allegation, and if not taken seriously, is simply a president lying about who attacked American water systems for reasons that have nothing to do with the facts.