President Donald Trump on Friday revisited his controversial comments about a potential Iranian attack on San Diego and Los Angeles, insisting that his administration would protect all American cities.
On Tuesday, Trump suggested that Iran could “take out” San Diego or Los Angeles with a nuclear weapon. In San Antonio Wednesday and in Washington on Friday, he offered additional context, at times seeming to roll back his comments, and at others appearing to double down.
Trump mockingly said on Friday that since the event in Nebraska, journalists reported “‘oh he said they’re gonna hit Los Angeles.’”
“They would have probably hit places like San Diego, Los Angeles first because the route for a missile is much more convenient,” he said of Iran at a White House event on Friday.
According to a transcript of Trump’s original remarks on Tuesday in Nebraska, here’s what led to and followed the controversial line:
“I want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. 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. They can take out a city. Let them take, let them out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. 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.”
As headlines started pouring out from news outlets across the country on Wednesday – and Gov. Gavin Newsom and elected officials in San Diego and Los Angeles condemned his remarks – Trump Administration argued the president’s remarks were being taken out of context. Rather than inviting an attack on two California cities, they argued, he was saying that temporary high gas prices were a small price to pay compared to a potential attack if he had not gone to war with Iran.
Trump dodged the topic on Wednesday, even when reporters in a gaggle asked what he meant by his statement. Yet at a Ken Paxton campaign event in Texas, he briefly tried to contextualize his remarks to a group of like-minded Republicans.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Trump said. “We protect our cities. We protect our country.”
In the same speech, Trump reemphasized his points about Southern California.
“You wanna see trauma? You wanna see problems? And I said it the other day ‘Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles,’” he said at a campaign event for Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton. “You want to see a horror show? … You want to see a country that would be in freefall?”
The president’s way of speaking makes it so “there is no possible way to linguistically interpret Trump’s two statements as representing a consistent stance,” said Jennifer Sclafani, an assistant professor of applied linguistics at UMass Boston, in a statement to Times of San Diego.
“Trump’s tendency to speak in this style when discussing serious issues is, on one hand, essentially a way to stay true to his ‘brand’ as a politician, but in contexts like this, it also works in terms of maintaining plausible deniability,” she said.
Trump is known for straying from his prewritten remarks — even doing so at the event in Texas.
“I hope you don’t mind my getting off script. I’ve basically been off script for the entire night,” he said at the event.
Sclafani said Trump doesn’t follow linguistic norms: often jumping from topic to topic, mixing serious talk with “what he considers ‘jokes’” or making provocative claims.
“(H)e’s established a pattern that leads us to believe we should never take his words at face value. That way, he can choose when he wants to mean what he says — which is whenever it works for him politically,” she said.
At the White House event on Friday, Trump repeated remarks that Iran was only “two weeks” from having a nuclear weapon and said his war stopped it.
“If we hadn’t attacked them with the B2 bombers early on, they were two weeks away – maybe three weeks away – from having a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
Trump is set to make another campaign appearance in Tennessee this weekend.
