# Donald Trump — "let 'em take out Los Angeles" > [!quote] "They can take out a city. Let 'em take out Los Angeles. Let 'em take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay." > — Donald Trump, pre-midterm campaign rally, Grand Island, Nebraska, 5 October 2026 ## Context The rally was a pre-midterm campaign event in Grand Island, Nebraska, with Senator [[Pete Ricketts]] present. Trump was defending the [[Iran War 2026]] against its costs. The fuller transcription matters, because the sequence is what is in dispute: > [!quote] The surrounding passage > "And again, remember, with the war, it's just artificial. … It's a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. … **They can 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 it's going to be over with very soon. It's essentially almost over with. … And they might keep going a little long." > — as transcribed by ABC7 Los Angeles ## Why it is on this page as disputed **The words are not in question. The referent is.** Two readings are available from the same audio, and the vault should not pick one silently: 1. **As heard by the mayors of both named cities** — an American president telling a crowd that the destruction of Los Angeles and San Diego would be an acceptable cost, said to applause. 2. **As the White House framed it afterward** — that the war is being fought precisely to *stop* Iran from striking those cities, and that "a very small price to pay" attaches to the war's economic cost, which is the subject of the preceding sentence. CNN's Daniel Dale, examining the viral clip, concluded that **its caption misrepresented Trump's words while the remarks remained inappropriate in context.** That is close to the honest position: the second reading is grammatically available and the first is what the construction "let 'em take out" ordinarily means. A speaker arguing that a war prevents a city's destruction does not normally invite the destruction in the imperative. This page exists because the quote travelled fast in the first reading and the vault's rule is to hold the verbatim and the dispute together rather than to resolve a contested meaning by repetition. Heather Cox Richardson's letter of 6 October 2026 carried the first reading without the dispute. ## Reactions > [!quote] "San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable. And we are never a 'small price to pay.'" > — Todd Gloria, Mayor of San Diego, October 2026 > [!quote] "The role of a president is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it and encourage attacks on American lives." > — [[Karen Bass]], Mayor of Los Angeles, October 2026 [[Gavin Newsom]], Governor of California, called the remarks "disgusting and disqualifying" and Trump "deranged and dangerous"; his press office framed the remark as advocating an attack on more than ten million US residents. Historian [[Timothy Snyder]] read it as revealing that Trump's focus is on "staying in power." > [!warning] Single-source quote > The Snyder characterization and the Newsom press-office framing are relayed through Richardson's letter of 6 October 2026 and were not confirmed to a second independent source. The Gloria, Bass and Newsom quotes above are carried by Newsweek independently of the letter. ## Why This Matters The vault already holds a long record of [[Donald Trump]] describing the [[Iran War 2026]]'s costs as trivial — "small potatoes" in September 2026, "a little pinprick" at the G7 in June. This remark is the same move applied to American cities rather than to foreign targets or to casualty counts, delivered at a campaign rally five weeks before the [[2026 Midterm Elections]], and it produced the first instance in the cycle of mayors of both affected cities answering the president directly. It is also a clean case study in how a contested clip becomes a settled fact. Within a day the first reading was in a mass-circulation newsletter without the dispute attached, and the dispute itself was documented only by a fact-checker and a network transcription. Which of the two readings is remembered will not be decided by the audio. ## See Also - [[Iran War 2026]] — the war whose costs the remark was defending - [[Trump Iran War Quotes]] — the running quote timeline from the war's opening months - [[2026 Midterm Elections]] — the campaign the rally was part of - [[Karen Bass]] — Mayor of Los Angeles - [[Gavin Newsom]] — Governor of California