‘Trump mentioned ‘Iran bombing LA is small value to pay’ – and it issues even when he did not imply it’
No other politician in the world gets taken “seriously but not literally”. It’s unreasonable to expect Americans to all possess a Donald Trump decoder ring
(Image: Getty Images)
By now you’ve probably seen the footage of Donald Trump apparently suggesting that sacrificing the cities of Los Angeles or San Diego, which between them have a population of about 4 million and a million and a half respectively, would be a small price to pay for ending the war in Iran.
This is objectively a mad thing to say. So it got me wondering if he really said it. Here’s the full transcript, with a bit of context before and after.
“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 out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. And it’s going to be over with very soon. Essentially it’s almost over with.”
So …yeah, those are the words that he said.
And understandably they have gone down very poorly indeed – particularly in California, which – it appears – Trump would be happy to see largely reduced to rubble if it meant winning his poorly defined war of choice. LA Mayor Karen Bass said the comment was “an attempt to encourage attacks on American lives.”
And governor Gavin Newsom said the remarks were “dangerous – if not treasonous”.
The White House, as you can imagine, interpreted it differently. Comms chief Steven Chung – who is one of the most combative people alive who isn’t also an ultimate fighter – said we’d got it all wrong. Branding it a “media freakout”, he said Trump was “clearly stating US Cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.”
Which…isn’t what he said. If we were to give Trump the benefit of the doubt – and after creating the most dangerously divisive decade of politics in modern history, lying, cheating and upturning societal and geopolitical norms to a hugely damaging effect for entire world, largely for his own gain, there’s no reason he deserves the benefit of the doubt….
…but if we were to give it to him, you could argue that it’s what he meant to say. But it’s not what he said.
And while it’s obviously important to drill into what a politician actually means, the words that they say aren’t irrelevant. You can’t just say ‘oh ignore the things he says’ just because he’s doddery and imprecise.
Back in his first term, when he said there were “very fine people on both sides” of the racist Charlottesville ‘Unite the Right’ March, Trump – and a lot of his water carriers – argued that he was not, in fact, saying the Neo nazis responsible for the march were ‘very fine people’.
But it was implicit in the words that he actually, in reality, used.
And you know who didn’t spend too long trying to work out if he was really praising the Neo nazis? The Neo nazis. They took it as a barely coded high five from the president of the United States.
Nobody else gets this kind of treatment. No other politician in the world gets taken “seriously but not literally”. It’s unreasonable to expect Americans to all possess a Donald Trump decoder ring, with which to decipher his lunatic ramblings and get to the root of what he really means.
More to the point, I’m pretty sure the decoder rings aren’t sold in Iran either.
