Donald Trump has sparked fury across California after telling supporters that Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego while defending the economic cost of the war.
Speaking at a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, the US president was arguing that higher prices caused by the conflict were worth enduring if they made America and the wider world safer. What followed was a sentence so jarring that even some Republicans have distanced themselves from it.
Trump said:
“It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let ’em take out Los Angeles. Let ’em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay.”
The crowd applauded.
The White House has since insisted the comments were being misrepresented. Communications director Steven Cheung said Trump was trying to argue that a nuclear-armed Iran could have threatened American cities and that his administration’s actions had prevented that scenario.
He wrote:
“The media freakout over President Trump’s comments is not rooted in reality. He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.”
The White House Rapid Response account went further, accusing critics of twisting the president’s words and insisting he meant the United States was fighting to stop Iran from ever having the capacity to hit cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego.
That explanation does not change what Trump actually said, and California leaders reacted accordingly.
Newsom calls Trump ‘deranged and dangerous’
California governor Gavin Newsom responded almost immediately.
He wrote:
“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.
“He is deranged and dangerous.”
Newsom’s press office later added:
“Let’s be clear: The President is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities.
“This is not normal. None of this is.”
Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass also condemned the remarks, saying a president’s role is to protect the country rather than make comments that could be interpreted as encouraging attacks on American lives. San Diego mayor Todd Gloria was equally blunt, saying his city was “not collateral damage”, “not expendable” and never a “small price to pay”.
The criticism was not entirely partisan either.
Jim Desmond, a Republican congressional candidate and Navy veteran from the San Diego area, publicly rejected Trump’s comments and said no American city or family should ever be treated as expendable.
The comment came while Trump was defending the Iran war
Trump made the remarks while defending the ongoing war with Iran and its impact on prices.
He told supporters that fuel, fertiliser and other costs had risen because of the conflict but described those increases as a relatively small sacrifice for national security. He also claimed the war was almost over and said the United States was “kicking Iran’s ass”.
That is why the White House argues the Los Angeles and San Diego line has been taken out of context. In its interpretation, Trump was not saying an Iranian attack would be acceptable, but rather trying to dramatise what might have happened if Iran had been allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon.
The difficulty is that the wording he chose did not sound hypothetical.
“Let ’em take out Los Angeles” is a very different sentence from “Iran could have taken out Los Angeles if we had done nothing”, and that gap between the intended argument and the actual words is what fuelled the backlash.
Los Angeles and San Diego are hardly random examples
Trump’s choice of cities also drew attention because both are in deeply Democratic California, a state he has repeatedly targeted politically.
Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States, while San Diego is one of the country’s most important military centres, with major Navy and Marine Corps facilities and a huge population of serving personnel, veterans and their families.
That made the idea of casually naming either city as something that could be “taken out” particularly inflammatory.
It also led some critics to ask whether Trump was joking about two Democratic strongholds rather than making a serious national-security argument.
There is no evidence from the speech that Trump was drawing on classified intelligence or identifying genuine Iranian targets. Reporting from California noted that it was unclear whether there was any intelligence behind the remark at all, and Iran is not currently believed to possess the conventional ballistic-missile capability to strike the continental United States directly.
The internet reaction was immediate
The clip spread rapidly online, and the reaction was savage.
@JoJoFromJerz wrote:
“He knows those cities are in America, right?”
@Acosta said:
“The crowd starts to applaud as Trump fantasizes about LA and San Diego being wiped out by a nuclear attack. WTF. This is not normal.”
@mariashriver wrote:
“This should outrage every American. This is the president of the United States telling Iran to bomb American cities. I live in Los Angeles, but that’s beside the point. Tommorow it could be your city.
My fellow Americans, this is not normal. This is not funny. This behavior…”
@27KeysToTheRace wrote:
“An American president casually accepting the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego as ‘a small price to pay.’ A staggering betrayal of the most basic duty of the presidency.”
@ArbiterofCool wrote:
“Get this vile, erratic idiot out of office before the regret gets BIG.”
@Jemelehill wrote:
“So when Trump eventually passes away, as a Los Angeles resident, I’m going to keep that same energy.
By the way, millions of people in California voted for him and he just told them they are collateral damage.”
And @Eddy_564 wrote:
“San Diego is one of the biggest military towns in the USA you absolute fucking idiot”
‘A small price to pay’
The most politically damaging phrase may not even be the reference to Los Angeles and San Diego itself.
It is the description of the consequences as a “small price to pay”.
Trump appears to have been talking primarily about higher economic costs caused by the war, but because he immediately followed that with the line about cities being “taken out”, critics interpreted the phrase as applying to human lives too.
That interpretation is exactly what the White House is now trying to push back against.
Associated Press reported that Cheung accused the media of creating a “freakout” divorced from the real meaning of the speech, while Reuters described Trump’s remarks as drawing condemnation from both Democratic officials and some Republicans.
The row comes at a particularly bad moment for Trump, with the November midterms approaching and the Iran war already weighing heavily on American politics.
The conflict has driven up energy prices, created new security fears and become one of the biggest issues hanging over Republican candidates as they try to hold Congress.
Trump wanted the Nebraska rally to make the case that the war was worth it.
Instead, one sentence has left his own White House explaining why the president did not really mean what millions of people heard him say.
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