Here we go again. President Trump stands up at a rally in Nebraska and says Iran, if it ever gets a nuclear weapon, could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, and within about eleven minutes the entire expert-media complex is fainting onto its collective chaise longue. Gavin Newsom, a man who couldn’t keep the lights on in his own state, called the remarks “deranged and dangerous.” Milana Vayntrub, the actress from the AT&T commercials, piled on too. And Trump has since said the comment was misinterpreted, that he was talking about the threat, not handing out target coordinates.
Now, I’m not a professional fact-checker with a journalism degree and a trust fund. But I’ve been around long enough to know how this movie ends. A Republican says something colorful, the press strips out every word of context, and suddenly we’re told the president is personally loading warheads for Tehran. FactCheck.org is already on the case, which in my experience means the case is whatever they decided it was before lunch.
Here’s the part nobody in the smart set wants to touch. Why is the president of the United States even talking about Iran and California cities in the same breath? Because there’s a war on over there, and there’s a foreign policy establishment over here that has been wrong about that part of the world since before I had knees. Trump’s whole point, as far as I can tell, was that a nuclear Iran would be a catastrophe, and that some people seem awfully relaxed about it. That’s not a threat to Los Angeles. That’s an argument about not letting the mullahs get the bomb. But you won’t hear that framing from the outlets that spent four years telling you the laptop was Russian disinformation.
Meanwhile, the outrage chorus is led by exactly the people you’d expect. Newsom runs a state that burned while he was busy doing podcasts, and now he’s the sober statesman. And Vayntrub, look, I’ll give credit where it’s due: the woman raised over half a million dollars for wildfire victims, including a single mother with a disabled son who lost everything. That’s real money for real people, and she did it herself, no government program, no grant application, no middleman with a lanyard. That’s more than the entire California state bureaucracy managed in the same window. So when she’s got something to say about Los Angeles, she’s earned a seat at the table.
But notice the pattern, because the pattern is always the story. The same Hollywood crowd that raises money for fire victims never once asks why the fires got that bad in the first place. Nobody asks about the water that wasn’t in the hydrants, the forests nobody was allowed to clear, the officials who got promoted anyway. No, no. The little guy’s house burns down, the celebrities write checks, and the actual question, who benefits from a state that can’t manage a matchstick, goes unasked. Follow that one at your own risk.
So was the comment misinterpreted? Trump says it was, and I’ll tell you plainly: I trust his account of his own sentence more than I trust the people whose job it is to misinterpret him professionally. The man talks like a guy at the end of the bar, which is exactly why the barstool crowd voted for him and the people with three degrees and zero common sense can’t stand him. Every time they hyperventilate over a rally quote, another few hundred thousand Americans stop listening to them entirely. That’s not a bug in the system, friends. That’s the system, working exactly the way somebody designed it.
The experts were wrong about the wars, wrong about the vaccines, wrong about the economy, and wrong about the last two elections. But sure, let’s all panic because this time, finally, they’ve got the quote right.