THE DEEP RED PATRIOTIC HEARTLAND (The Daily Whatever Press)—Three times in three days, the president of the United States stood in front of a wall of American flags and invited a country we are currently at war with to hit two American cities. Not implied. Not dog-whistled. Said, with his mouth, into a microphone, on tape.
Monday, October 5, Grand Island, Nebraska: “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.” That’s one.
Wednesday, October 7, a rally in San Antonio: “I said it the other day: let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles.” That’s two. He opened with “I said it the other day.” He knew exactly what he’d said, he’d watched two days of mayors and a governor lose their minds over it, and he walked back onstage and did it again, on purpose, as a callback. Comedians do callbacks. Presidents are not supposed to do them with the names of cities.
Same day, same town, on News 4 San Antonio: “Let’s see what would happen if they ever did something” to those cities. That’s three.
Thursday, once somebody handed him a card, he “clarified”: “We’re not going to let that happen. We protect our cities.” Lovely. Except he repeated the invitation on his way to the walk-back. That’s four, if you’re counting, and I am fucking counting.
Thirteen million rounding errors
Thirteen million people live in Los Angeles and San Diego counties. Thirteen million Americans with mortgages, kids in the Cal State system, and a Navy—San Diego is the home port of the Pacific Fleet, so the commander in chief invited an enemy to put a missile into his own ships. They were volunteered, as a rounding error, by a man who will never stand on a sidewalk in either city when a siren goes off.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria: “San Diego is not collateral damage. We are not expendable.” Jim Desmond, a Republican running for Congress in San Diego County: “No American city is expendable.” When the Republicans on the ballot are breaking with you over which American cities you’d sacrifice, you have located a brand-new bottom.
Article III, for those who skipped it
The Constitution defines exactly one crime. One. Article III, Section 3: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Enemies. Aid and comfort. Two witnesses to the same overt act.
Since February 28, the United States has been at war with Iran. He started it—joint strikes with Israel, the Supreme Leader dead by day two. So Iran is not an enemy the way Fox News calls Chicago an enemy. Iran is an enemy in the one sense the Constitution recognizes: we are shooting at them and they are shooting back. And the president told that enemy, three times, in public, which two American cities he was prepared to lose. If anyone in Tehran was wondering where American resolve is softest, they got the answer in English, with applause.
Article II, Section 4 lists the grounds for impeachment and puts treason first, ahead of bribery. Title 18, Section 2381 sets the penalty: death, or not less than five years, and permanent disqualification from any office under the United States.
So here is the standard, in writing, while the cities are still standing. If a single Iranian missile lands on a single American city—any city, not just the two he named—impeach him. Convict him. Remove him. Try him under Article III in front of a jury drawn from the thirteen million he volunteered. And if that jury does its job, the statute says what the statute says, and the first sentence it lists is the rope. Legally. After a trial. With more witnesses than any treason case in the history of the republic, because he keeps manufacturing them at rallies, and 340 million of us have seen it as witnesses.
I can’t stop watching the room
I’ll tell you what I keep rewinding, and it isn’t him. It’s the crowd.
When he said “Let ’em take out Los Angeles,” people in Grand Island, Nebraska, cheered. Not gasped. Not shifted in their seats. Cheered. The same people who get misty at Lee Greenwood heard the president offer two American cities to a foreign enemy and went whooooooo.
Maybe there’s a new verse, Lee?
“ 'Cause I’m proud to be an American!
Even when they nuke LA!
'Cause Donald Trump said fuck those libs!
God bless the U.S.A!”
Every Gen X kid saw Red Dawn in 1984. The entire premise was that when foreign soldiers drop into an American town, ordinary people with deer rifles fight for it. Wolverines. Forty-two years later the audience has switched sides and is cheering for the paratroopers, because the town is in a blue state.
I was thirteen when ABC aired The Day After and a hundred million of us watched Lawrence, Kansas, turn to ash. Ronald Reagan wrote in his diary that it left him “greatly depressed.” That was a Republican president’s reaction to one imaginary American city burning. This one uses it as a laugh line, and the room actually laughs.
I don’t care what hat you wore to the fairgrounds. If you cheered that, you are a fucking monster, and you have forfeited the thing you claim to love. You don’t get the flag. You don’t get the anthem. You don’t get to call anybody else un-American for the rest of your natural life, because you cheered for an enemy to kill Americans, and you did it with a corn dog in your hand. The privileges of this country belong to the people who would stand in front of Los Angeles, not the ones who applauded its sentencing.
The translator defense
The White House’s official rebuttal, from its Rapid Response account, was “No, he didn’t, you buffoons.” Then FactCheck.org and CNN’s Daniel Dale sat down with the transcript and reverse-engineered a sentence he could plausibly have meant: that higher gas prices are a small price compared with a nuclear Iran that could someday threaten those cities.
Fine. Take the charitable reading. In it, the president is so incapable of building a sentence that two professional fact-checkers had to translate him out of inviting a missile strike on his own country—and then, translation in hand, he flew to Texas and said it again. You don’t get to plead incoherence on Monday and intent on Wednesday. Gavin Newsom called it “dangerous—if not treasonous.” The “if not” is doing a lot of work. I’m taking it off.
Nothing has happened to either city. Nothing may ever happen, and I pray to a God I don’t believe in that nothing does. But he told us his price in front of a cheering crowd, three times, in three days. This is ours. It goes on the record now, while the lights are still on in Los Angeles, so nobody gets to say later that we never said it—or that he never did.
Thanks for stopping by!
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Those crowds are salivating for permission to harm Americans. January 6 was merely a prelude.