Trump Said "Let Them Take Out Los Angeles. Let Them Take Out San Diego." The Crowd Cheered.

In Grand Island, Nebraska, the president called gas prices "artificial" and losing two American cities "a very small price to pay." Either way it is read, he named them and the room applauded.

Here is what the president of the United States said on Monday night at the Pinnacle Bank Expo Center in Grand Island, Nebraska, at a rally for Republican candidates, in the portion of his speech devoted to the cost of the war with Iran. The transcription is ABC7's and matches, in every word that matters, the versions published by CNN and Mediaite.

“And again, remember, 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.” Then, after an ellipsis in the published transcript: “They can take out a city.” “Let them take out Los Angeles.” “Let them take out San Diego.” “This is a very small price to pay,” and “it’s going to be over with very soon.”

The crowd applauded at the names of the cities. Elsewhere in the speech he said the war was “essentially almost over with,” and, “By the way, we’re kicking Iran’s ass.”

The two readings

There are two ways to hear the passage, and fairness requires setting out both, because the White House had not, as of Tuesday morning, chosen one. CNN asked what the president meant and received no answer.

The first reading is the one the sentence structure supports. “It” is the price of gasoline, which he had just called artificial and a little high. The price is worth paying because Iran “can take out a city.” The two cities are the ones he reached for as examples of what Iran could take out. “Let them” is a rhetorical hypothetical, the way a man says “let them try,” and the “very small price” that follows is the gas again, measured against the loss of a city. On this reading the president was arguing that $6 diesel is cheap insurance against Los Angeles, and he expressed it in the grammar of permission.

The second reading is the literal one, and it is the one the crowd heard, because a crowd does not applaud a hypothetical. “Let them take out Los Angeles” is an imperative. He said it twice, once per city, and a Nebraska crowd cheered the idea of two California cities being destroyed. The governor of California, both of its senators, the mayors of both cities, and the Republican running for Congress in San Diego’s 48th District all heard it that way, or decided the intended reading made no difference. That last position is the defensible one. A president who, in a single breath, names two American cities as the ones a hostile power “can take out,” calls their loss a small price, and gets a cheer for it, has done the thing regardless of the intended syntax.

What the threat rests on

The hypothetical the president built to justify the war’s cost requires a capability Iran does not have. Iran’s longest-range ballistic missiles are rated at about 2,000 kilometers, a limit Tehran has described as self-imposed and that no Western intelligence service has credited it with exceeding. Los Angeles is roughly 12,000 kilometers from Tehran. Iran has no intercontinental missile, no nuclear weapon that the International Atomic Energy Agency or the American intelligence community has said exists, and no delivery system that reaches the Western Hemisphere. “They can take out a city” is, as a statement of present fact, false.

If the president meant a future Iran, nuclear-armed and intercontinental, then the sentence is an argument for the war, and it collides with the rest of the speech, in which the war is “essentially almost over with” and ending “right after the election, maybe before,” on terms he has said will be a deal. A war that is nearly over, on a deal, has either removed the threat to Los Angeles or left it in place, and the president claimed both in the same twenty minutes.

The two cities

He did not pick them at random, or if he did, the randomness fell badly. Los Angeles holds the largest Iranian community anywhere outside Iran, hundreds of thousands of people across Southern California, concentrated in a stretch of Westwood that has been called Tehrangeles for forty years. They are, overwhelmingly, people who left the Islamic Republic or whose parents did, and they have spent eight months watching a war against the government they fled. On Monday night the president of the country they fled to named their city as the one Iran could have.

San Diego is the principal home port of the Pacific Fleet. The USS Theodore Roosevelt, the carrier the president sent toward Iran as the third strike group of the largest American buildup since 2003, sailed from San Diego on September 27 with Carrier Air Wing 11 aboard. The 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, more than 2,000 Marines, left from the same coast on the Makin Island. The families of the sailors and Marines the president dispatched to fight Iran live in the city the president said Iran could take out, and they heard it from him before their husbands and wives reached the Strait of Hormuz.

Between the two cities, by the governor’s count, more than ten million people.

What was said back

Gavin Newsom: “deranged and dangerous,” and, in a longer statement, that the president “is advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents.” Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles: “The President of the United States suggested that a foreign government attack Los Angeles,” and his statements “could potentially compromise our safety.” Todd Gloria, the mayor of San Diego: “San Diego is not collateral damage.” “We are not expendable.” “And we are never a ‘small price to pay.’” Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, Sara Jacobs and Scott Peters, in the same register.

The one worth noting is Jim Desmond, the Republican candidate in California’s 48th District, which covers a good part of San Diego County, who said that “No American city is expendable” and that “no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.” He is running in a Republican-held district, four weeks from an election, and he judged that the words could not be left standing. No other Republican officeholder had said anything by Tuesday morning. The White House had said nothing.

The small price

What Monday night put on the record is the president’s accounting. Gasoline at a record is “artificial” and “a little bit high.” The war that produced it is a small price. The loss of a city of four million is “a very small price to pay.” Nineteen Americans, or twenty-three, are dead in the war; $43.6 billion is spent; the deficit is financed at the highest rate since 2002; and the heating oil that half of Maine burns is $6.02. Every one of those numbers has been described by this president, in the last two weeks, as small, or artificial, or about to be over. On Monday night the list acquired two cities.

Presidents avoid sentences like this for a reason unrelated to manners. The words of a commander in chief about his own territory are read in the capitals of the countries he is at war with, and a government in Tehran that has spent eight months calculating what the United States will absorb heard the United States, through its president, name the two cities it would absorb losing. Whatever he meant, that is what was transmitted. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard wrote an open letter to American voters last week. It will not need to write the next one. The president wrote it for them on Monday, in Nebraska, to applause.