The fake news media attempted to cook up their latest anti-Trump scandal.
Gavin Newsom piled on fast, and the cable networks kept the clip spinning for days.
But Trump finally answered the charge himself, and one word he picked for the press is going to sting.
A Gas Price Pitch in Nebraska Sparked a West Coast Meltdown
President Trump rolled into Grand Island, Nebraska, for a rally and did what he always does. He talked to the crowd like folks sitting around a kitchen table.
The subject was gasoline. Prices at the pump climbed after the war with Iran began, and Trump wanted voters to understand why he thinks the pinch is worth it.
“And again, remember, with the war, it’s just artificial. It’s a little bit high,” Trump told the crowd. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They could 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 gonna be over with very soon.”
Read the whole passage slowly and the point jumps right off the page. A few extra cents on a gallon of gas beats a nuclear-armed Iran hitting a major American city. Anybody who ever had to pick between a bad option and a catastrophic one gets it immediately.
But slice out three sentences, strip away the gas talk, and drop the result on social media, and suddenly the man sounds like he’s mailing Tehran a map.
And that’s the version the country saw first.
The Los Angeles Times ran a headline claiming Trump suggested letting Iran “take out” the two cities. Left-leaning outlets chopped the moment into bite-sized videos. Newsom fired off a post calling the remark “Disgusting and disqualifying.”
He didn’t stop there. In another post, the California Governor 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 tacked on a line calling the President “deranged and dangerous.”
The Democrat mayors of both cities jumped into the pile too. San Diego’s mayor announced his city would not serve as “collateral damage.”
Nobody in that crowd seemed interested in the sentence that came right before the clipped part.
Trump Said It Again in Texas and the Press Still Looked Away
A few days later, Trump took the stage at a rally in Texas and walked through the same comparison. This time he made the stakes even plainer.
“You want to see a horror show? You want to see problems? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles,” Trump said. Moments later he finished the thought. “We protect our cities, we protect our country. We’re not letting that happen.”
That’s a President describing the nightmare he means to stop. It’s tough to squint hard enough to read it any other way.
And yet the “Trump wants California bombed” storyline kept right on rolling.
Even CNN’s Daniel Dale, the network’s resident fact-checker and hardly anybody’s idea of a Trump cheerleader, made the case that viewers needed the full remarks instead of a clip to understand what the President meant. When the guy CNN pays to catch Trump in mistakes says context matters, the clip crowd has a real problem on its hands.
The White House’s Rapid Response 47 account went after the Los Angeles Times headline as well. PolitiFact, of all places, published the longer transcript so readers could judge the words in order.
The One Word Trump Saved for the Fake News
For a while, Trump brushed off reporters who wanted him to chew on the controversy. Then he took to Truth Social and let it rip at what he called the “Fake and Artificial News.”
“All I was doing was making a comparison between paying a little more, for a short time, for Gasoline, versus the bombing of our Major Cities,” Trump wrote.
He kept going. “Everybody knew that, the Fake News knew it as well, but they continue to go out and say that I am asking the enemy to bomb two Cities that I love.”
Then came the line that’ll have newsroom staffers grinding their molars. “It’s totally clear what I say but, these people are Degenerates, and think they can continuously get away with Fake News!”
Degenerates. One word, delivered by the most famous man on the planet to the people who spent days twisting his. You can bet that one landed somewhere around the Los Angeles Times copy desk.
Same Clip Game, Different Year
Folks with long memories have watched this movie before.
Back in 2017, the press spent years insisting Trump praised neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, even though he condemned them in the very same remarks. In March 2024, Trump warned at an Ohio rally that Chinese-built cars would bring a “bloodbath” to the American auto industry. Within hours, a chunk of the press corps had turned an economic warning into a supposed call for violence.
The recipe never changes much. Find a vivid phrase, cut the sentence before it, cut the sentence after it, and let the outrage do the rest. By the time the full transcript surfaces, the damage already happened and the correction ends up buried somewhere near the classifieds.
But this round carries a little extra irony.
Newsom wants voters furious at Trump over gasoline. Californians already pay some of the highest pump prices in the country, and plenty of that pain comes straight out of Sacramento through state gas taxes and fuel regulations. Trump himself called on California to cut those taxes earlier this year. The Governor never seemed nearly as worked up about that.
And then there’s the war itself. Trump told the Nebraska crowd the conflict is “essentially almost over with.” The whole point of the comparison was that the fight with Iran ends soon, the nuclear threat goes away, and the gas prices come back down. That’s the America First approach in a nutshell: finish the job, keep the bomb out of the mullahs’ hands, and skip the twenty-year quagmire that Washington’s war crowd always seems to prefer.
Maybe that’s what really bugs his critics. A short war with a clear goal doesn’t give anybody much to campaign on.
What Comes Next for the Los Angeles Clip
Don’t expect this clip to disappear anytime soon. The midterms are coming in November, and a ten-second video of Trump saying “let them take out Los Angeles” is exactly the sort of thing that ends up in a Democrat attack ad with spooky music behind it.
But voters have gotten wiser about this trick. Millions of Americans now go hunting for the full video before they believe a viral clip, and a growing number simply assume the cut version is hiding something.
Trump’s bet is that his voters will read the whole quote. Judging by his last two elections, that’s a bet he’s won before.
And the press? It just got called a name by the President of the United States, and it walked right into it.
Sources:
Mediaite, “Trump Explains His ‘Take Out Los Angeles’ Comment in Fiery Attack on the ‘Fake and Artificial News’”
PolitiFact, “In Context: What Trump said about gas prices, Iran and taking out Los Angeles and San Diego”
California Globe, coverage of California Democrats’ reaction to Trump’s Grand Island remarks
Quartz, “Trump threatens gas retailers with ‘big problems’ if they don’t slash prices to $2.50”