On Wednesday, President Donald Trump doubled down on a controversial statement about what he believed Iran could do to the U.S. should it obtain a nuclear weapon, saying at a campaign rally in San Antonio, “Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles.”
It appears that Trump is trying to coin a provocative new refrain. And even though he’s subsequently strained to contextualize the remarks, it’s easy to see why it appeals to him: He delights in using linguistic ambiguity to say transgressive and vicious things.
To get the full effect, watch Trump’s first deployment of the phrase at a rally in Nebraska on Tuesday, as he’s talking about the war in Iran and the price of gas:
“With the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. [Cheers from the audience.] That’s — this is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”
Democrats were aghast, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom saying on X, “Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous.”
But the White House defended Trump’s remarks as a hypothetical scenario that might have transpired had Trump not intervened in the Middle East. “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said. (Never mind that there is no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon.) Some fact-checkers were convinced by the White House’s cleanup efforts.
It’s extremely rare for Trump to offer such a full-throated defense of his own rhetoric.
The reality is that Trump used pacing, tone and emphasis to hint at multiple meanings. It’s true that he was discussing the war and that a logical implication of what he was saying was that American cities could be under threat — again, assuming we grant the false premise that Iran was homing in on such a nuclear capacity or possesses ballistic missiles capable of such range.
At the same time, the way Trump firmly proposes this hypothetical scenario — and his use of the word “let” makes it sound almost as if such a scenario could be permissible or even desirable — is likely why the MAGA audience starts to cheer. Choosing two scenic, left-leaning cities, which are not particularly vulnerable to attacks compared to other cities, does not seem random. Trump’s tone and cadence may signal to his audience that those cities are ones he would be willing to concede in the event of an attack, while also giving them permission to briefly fantasize about the destruction of Democrat-led cities.
In Texas on Wednesday, Trump returned to the idea: “You want to see trauma? You want to see problems? And I said it the other day, ‘Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. Let them hit’ — You want to see a horror show? …You want to see some bad things happen, you want to see a country that would be in free fall? We’re not going to let that happen,” he said.
This time there are fewer cheers and Trump more explicitly brackets off the idea of bombarded cities as a hypothetical by saying he will not allow it to happen. But it is plainly odd and more than a little bit spooky to repeatedly invoke such nightmare scenarios, inviting the audience to wonder what a “horror show” of a decimated American city would look like. And it’s hard to imagine receptivity from a MAGA audience if Trump had cavalierly invoked the annihilation of Jacksonville or Oklahoma City.
Amid a roar of pushback Thursday, Trump defended his new bit on Truth Social, saying, “What I was talking about was that a temporary increase in the price of Gasoline is a small price to pay for Iran not having a Nuclear Weapon and, if you want to see a big price, can you imagine what it would be like if they bombed San Diego and/or Los Angeles?”
It’s extremely rare for Trump to offer such a full-throated defense of his own rhetoric, so he seems to have intuited why this rubbed so many people the wrong way. But it would be easier to give Trump the benefit of the doubt if he did not have a history of politicizing disaster aid funding and social services in ways that indicate he prioritizes the lives and well-being of people from red states over blue states.
And, of course, it’s possible that none of this would be debated if we weren’t subjected to Trump’s increasingly elliptical and incoherent speech patterns, which make it difficult to discern what he means as he constantly interrupts his own train of thought.
One need not worry about whether these cities are safe from an attack from Iran — they are, and not due to Trump’s foolish war. But one can’t help but wonder if Trump would be willing to take legitimate national security threats to people in cities he doesn’t care for seriously, whether due to indifference or spite.
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