It’s four weeks until Election Day and Donald Trump is doing his utmost to dig Republicans out of their polling hole. In theory, anyway. Trump has been rallying through red states – Alabama, Oklahoma, Texas – to try and secure existing Senate seats. But today’s Democratic pile-on concerns a throwaway comment he made last night in Nebraska. Mid-weave, of course.
The President said: “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could take out a city… ‘let ’em, let ’em take Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego, that’s…’ this is a very small price to pay… and it’s gonna be over with very soon, it’s essentially almost over with.”
Now anybody who has followed Donald Trump, even passingly, in the last ten years, should be able to discern what he was getting at here.
He was acknowledging the cost of the Iran war, and attempting to justify his decision to start the now seven-month-long conflict.
The clips now going viral on X paraphrase Trump differently. “Trump on Iran: Let ’em take out Los Angeles and San Diego, it’s a small price to pay,” reads the caption of a tweet from “Headquarters,” an account that was previously “@KamalaHQ,” run by the Harris campaign’s rapid response team. The ensuing reaction from the media, and Trump’s opponents, is just as disingenuous. “Trump suggests letting Iran ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego at campaign rally,” reads the Los Angeles Times headline. “After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego,” tweeted Governor Gavin Newsom last night. “He is deranged and dangerous.”
Team Trump has been quick to push back on the pearl-clutching. “The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality,” said White House comms director Steven Cheung. “He was clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.”
Yet Newsom is never one to let a good crisis go to waste. “I am directing the State Threat Assessment Center to actively monitor the situation in the event that foreign actors interpret the President’s remarks as an invitation to target California,” he wrote this morning, in a post that suggested Trump’s naming of LA and San Diego is “treasonous.”
Cheung’s case admittedly isn’t helped by the fact that a number of Nebraskan rally attendees cheered the phrase “take out Los Angeles and San Diego.” But the fact is that Trump fans are better at interpreting the President’s words than his political opponents.
“This isn’t a direct quote from Trump, and I very much don’t think it’s a correct paraphrase,” wrote CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale, in response to the Headquarters tweet. “Trump has repeatedly argued that the consequences of the war, like higher gas prices, are a small price to pay compared to what an unchecked Iran could allegedly do. Last night, in especially rambling and incomplete fashion, he 1) claimed high prices are temporary and suggested they’re ‘artificial’; 2) contrasted that to the damage of Iran supposedly taking out a city; 3) and then, in especially confusing style, repeated his old point that ‘this,’ as in the consequences of the war, is a small price to pay to avoid something like a a city being wiped out.”
“It’s Trump’s fault you kinda have to be steeped in TrumpRallySpeak to know what he was saying last night,” Dale concluded.
Still, Cockburn can’t help but feel for Steve Hilton in all this. Just imagine: you’re hitting the trail, doing your utmost to win the California governorship, trying to keep the focus on the failures of Newsom’s tenure and the ineptitude of your opponent Xavier Becerra. You’re 25 points behind in the Berkeley-IGS poll. Then you check your phone and see that your next few days are going to be dominated by something the President said in a cornfield 1,000 miles away. Couldn’t he have named any other cities?
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