Monday night at a campaign rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, the President of the United States said this about Iran: “They could take out a city. Let ‘em take out Los Angeles. Let ‘em take out San Diego… This is a very small price to pay.”
And the crowd laughed and cheered.
All day long I’ve read and listened to the Trump translators and apologists, including White House Communications Director Steven Cheung. Cheung called the reaction a “media freakout” that was “not rooted in reality,” while the White House’s rapid response account called reporters “buffoons.” I’ve watched them twist and turn and blame the rest of us for not being able to speak Trump’s language.
There’s a name for that: DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Psychologist Jennifer Freyd identified the pattern decades ago, and she has written about how institutions use it too. That’s exactly what this White House did. In fact, it’s this administration’s signature move.
Even CNN’s analysis, which called the remark more incoherent than malicious, said the ugliest part of the whole episode was that people cheered.
So let’s just agree on this: 13 million Americans live in those two counties. They are not a small price, and their deaths are not something a crowd should cheer.
But make no mistake, Trump is doing what he’s always done. Historians already rank him dead last among American presidents, and he keeps working to earn it.
The outrage directed at him is just and necessary, because what he said was dangerous, stupid, and a betrayal of his oath. His careless and callous choices have already cost American lives:
service members killed in a war with Iran that Congress never declared;
citizens like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot dead in Minneapolis by masked federal agents;
Americans who died of measles during the worst outbreak since 1991, on the watch of a health secretary who has spent his career undermining vaccines.
Abroad, researchers writing in The Lancet project that his foreign aid cuts could cause millions of deaths by 2030. And now he has told every hostile actor on Earth that the president considers two American cities expendable.
So much for “promote the general Welfare.”
But let’s talk about the future.
Presidents generally serve as political counterbalances to one another, in succession. Political scientists call it the thermostat: when policy runs too hot in one direction, the public turns the dial the other way.
Trump has altered that cycle in significant ways. He’s not just the idiotic inverse of Obama’s dignity and restraint, and he’s not just a pair of boorish bookends around Biden’s business as usual.
He’s a blunt culture unto himself. That means the counterbalance to the Trump era will need to come from all of us.
And I predict it will be a doozy: a period of renewed decency, radical empathy, and a recognition that dignity for all is what saves us.
Researchers have found again and again that a community, a city, achieves harmony when its people have what they need — not just enough to eke out survival, but enough to live with dignity. We’re talking about jobs, affordable rent, groceries, healthcare, public services, the works. When people have those things, trust goes up and violence goes down. People also live longer. When states expanded Medicaid, death rates among low-income older adults fell.
The world Trump keeps selling us is one in which those who have the most are aggrieved, and those who have the least are the grievance — the cause of all our problems. They don’t belong. They’re taking our jobs. Their hard circumstances are a moral failure of their own making. So let’s take away their healthcare, their food, their freedom, and their dignity, and give more to those who “know what to do with it.”
That’s enough to keep us fighting among ourselves. Meanwhile, the oligarchs use their influence over technology, media, and patronage to get around the inconveniences of democracy. Those inconveniences are the very constraints Trump and Project 2025 have constantly tested and aim to destroy.
In June, the Heritage Foundation itself said Project 2025 is 53% complete. But there’s no end game for the people behind it. It’s a constant attack on our republic until we stop it.
That’s what’s at stake in this midterm election. That’s why Trump is flailing, squirming, and dangling $5,000 checks he has no plan to pay for, and only if Republicans win. (Anyone spend their DOGE check? Didn’t think so.) It’s also why Republican money is retreating from races it once called winnable, abandoning North Carolina to defend Kansas.
Eras of civic renewal have come before. After the Gilded Age came the Progressive Era, and after Watergate came real ethics reform. Ours begins with these midterms, which will tell us whether the MAGA coalition is ready to break. I think it is.
I don’t believe that crowd in Nebraska wants Los Angeles wiped off the map. I think they’ve been told for ten years that people in cities like LA aren’t really their neighbors, that those people are “the radical left,” that they’re the problem. And when you hear that long enough, you laugh at jokes about them disappearing.
The counterbalance to that isn’t coming from a savior politician or from inside Washington. It’s coming from us: people who have always believed that lives in San Diego matter as much as lives in Nebraska, and who believe in dignity for all.
November 3 is four weeks away, and in many states early voting is already open or opens soon. Make your plan this week. Then make a second plan: bring one person with you who sat the last one out.
That’s how this particular pendulum swings. Not by itself.
By all of us, pushing.
Slade Wentworth | The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America, with recipes along the way.
Speaking as a former NATO intelligence officer first and then as a concerned US citizen, anytime a political leader offers up his own citizens as cannon fodder as acceptable collateral damage to an enemy combatant violates every known tenet of military and humanitarian law. First, there is no known strategic value to offering your own citizens and there is no tactical advantage. In his warped and deluded brain there is only the political and power advantage of the additional steps he needs toward declaring a national emergency, martial law and deploying troops to stop the lawful midterm elections and transfer of power in the coming year. What will inevitably follow will be a civil war between the forces loyal to MAGA and those who are determined to save the constitutional republic under which we have lived for 250 plus years. As a concerned citizen, it is beyond time for the moderate republicans to get off the fence, join forces with the democratic party and bring the full weight of the law to bear against the project 2025 MAGA regime and remove them all from office under Article II Section 4 for Treason and High Crimes, seize all assets of the Heritage Foundation, the Koch Brothers, remove the Chief Justice, Alito and Thomas from the Bench for corruption and begin investigations into corruption throughout congress. The next two years are critical to the survival of this republic.
Steven Cheung is a veritable troglodyte.