Let us be precise about what happened in Grand Island, Nebraska, because precision is apparently now the responsibility of everyone except the man who spoke. At a rally on Monday night, President Donald Trump, discussing his war with Iran, told a cheering crowd that elevated prices were “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe,” and then, in a rhetorical move that would fail a first-year seminar in argumentation, elaborated: “They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The crowd applauded. One notes, with the weariness of someone who has read a great deal of presidential rhetoric across two centuries, that the applause is the part scholars of authoritarian discourse find most diagnostic.
The White House, through communications director Steven Cheung, has since assured us this was all a “media freakout,” and that the president was “clearly stating US cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped.” By Thursday, Trump himself had settled on the interpretation that he was discussing gasoline prices, which is a fascinating hermeneutic claim given that the words “let them take out Los Angeles” contain no reference to gasoline, prices, or anything resembling a conditional. When a text requires this much rescue work from its own author, the scholarly literature is fairly settled on what we call that: not misinterpretation, but damage control.
The structural point, which I will now complicate and then complicate the complication, is this. Trump’s remark was not an aberration; it was a symptom. California is the administration’s designated internal other, the polity against which grievance is organized. Governor Gavin Newsom called the president “deranged and dangerous,” and noted, correctly, that this follows the deployment of National Guard and Marines to the state. Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles observed that a president’s role is to protect the country, not threaten it. Mayor Todd Gloria of San Diego, whose city hosts critical military infrastructure, put it most economically: “We are not expendable.” And Xavier Becerra, running for governor, added that thirteen million Californians are not a punchline. The complication: this is not merely cruelty, it is a governing strategy, in which blue cities are framed as negotiable assets. The complication of the complication: it works, politically, which is why the crowd applauded.
Into this steps Milana Vayntrub, the actress millions know as Lily from the AT&T commercials, who responded to the president’s remarks about the two cities with a public callout that has resonated widely. And here the contrast becomes almost embarrassingly instructive. While the president of the United States was rhetorically offering Los Angeles to a foreign adversary, Vayntrub, per her own announcement, has raised more than $500,000 for Los Angeles wildfire victims, $170,000 in four days for a single mother caring for a disabled son, and $350,000 more for My Tribe Rise, an Altadena organization distributing direct grants to fire survivors. She did it through boudoir-photo fundraisers with the nonprofit Only Philanthropy, whose motto, “using the male gaze to fight the blaze,” is at least an honest theory of change, which is more than one can say for the White House’s evolving exegesis of its own boss.
The literature on state-society relations has a term for a polity where celebrities outperform the executive in basic civic care: institutional hollowing. The president prices two American cities as acceptable losses; an actress from phone commercials prices them as neighbors. The empirical record on which of them Los Angeles should trust is, I would submit, not genuinely contested.