The President Would Like to Rephrase the Apocalypse

There are many ways to tell people that a war might make gasoline more expensive. A president can use numbers. He can explain strategy. He can say, in plain English, that preventing a dangerous outcome costs money.

Or he can stand at a rally and say, “Let ’em take out Los Angeles, let ’em take out San Diego,” then act surprised when everybody in earshot hears the part where he said exactly that.

Donald Trump made the remark in Grand Island, Nebraska on Oct. 5 while arguing that higher prices tied to the Iran war were a small price to pay. The surrounding remarks matter. He was talking about the danger of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, not issuing Tehran an invitation to attack California. His Oct. 8 Truth Social post said the same thing more clearly: he meant that a temporary increase in gasoline prices was preferable to major American cities being bombed.

FactCheck.org reached essentially that conclusion. Its reading was that Trump’s point was deterrence, delivered in the sort of verbal obstacle course that makes the Secret Service deserve overtime.

That distinction matters. He did not tell Iran to bomb Los Angeles and San Diego. Pretending otherwise is sloppy.

It is also sloppy to pretend the phrasing was fine because a charitable reader can reconstruct the thought afterward. Presidents are not judged only by what they meant after the cleanup crew arrives. They are judged by the words they used before the microphones were turned off.

And there was a cleanup crew. The White House said critics had ignored the context. Trump repeated the basic hypothetical at a San Antonio rally two days later, saying, “Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles,” before adding, “We’re not going to let that happen. We protect our cities.”

That last sentence was the sentence he needed the first time. It was sitting right there, apparently waiting for a second rally and a national backlash to get called into the game.

California Democrats condemned the original comments, as expected. More usefully, Reuters reported that Republican candidates Jim Desmond and Kevin Kiley also criticized them. Desmond said no American city is expendable. That should be one of those sentences nobody in elected office has to workshop.

Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered state threat monitoring after the remarks. California agencies reported no confirmed Iran threat at the time. So this was not a warning about an imminent strike. It was a warning about how the president talks when he wants people to stop noticing the price on the gas pump.

The point may have been defensible. The delivery was a master class in making the public do the work of interpretation that the person with the nuclear codes should probably handle himself.

The President Would Like to Rephrase the Apocalypse

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