Trump wants an Iron Dome, but he didn’t say to defend the United States from Canada

Former President Donald Trump recently promised to build "a great Iron Dome, very much like Israel has, but even better" if he’s reelected. 

"I’m saying, why don’t we have that?" Trump said at a May 1 campaign rally in Michigan. "We should have that too. We have a lot of hostile people out there, we have a lot of bad actors out there. We’re going to build the greatest dome of them all."

A clip of Trump saying this was shared in an X post that added: "Donald Trump wants to build an ‘iron dome’ at the border of our country to ‘defend us’ from Canada."

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Trump didn’t discuss Canada in his speech, however. Immediately before he offered voters an Iron Dome, he accused President Joe Biden of bringing the world "to the edge of nuclear war," and mentioned Russia, Ukraine, China and Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah. Following his comments in the X post about an Iron Dome, Trump said he would "put a shield around our country." 

The United States uses Iron Dome defense in limited ways. But because Israel’s Iron Dome was designed to combat threats faced by a small country surrounded by enemies, the technology is less useful in the United States, a country that lacks the same threats from its direct neighbors, including Canada.

The Iron Dome "is not designed for nor capable of intercepting nuclear warheads launched from intercontinental ranges," retired U.S. Air Force Col. Dana Struckman, a Naval War College professor, told PolitiFact. 

Trump may have said he wanted an Iron Dome, but he didn’t say he wanted it to protect the United States from Canada. We rate that claim False.