President Donald Trump said Iran could “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego, calling that possibility “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.” The White House later said he wasn’t calling for an attack on U.S. cities. But residents of those cities had entered a public argument about the cost of war.
Jim Desmond, the Republican congressional nominee in a metro San Diego district, answered with a line about who bears that cost: “As a Navy veteran, I served to protect Americans, not write off American cities as an acceptable price of war.” He added, “no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom called Trump “deranged and dangerous,” saying he was “saying our foreign enemies should ‘take out’ Los Angeles and San Diego.”
Who Gets Called the Price
Trump made the comments at a Monday night rally in Nebraska while discussing the Iran war and the resulting high gas prices, which have become a midterm liability for Republicans. His familiar rally style can run for extended periods, often an hour or more, and only occasionally follows prepared remarks on a teleprompter. In that setting, the consequences of war become part of a sprawling performance, before the White House later supplies its interpretation.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said on social media that people had misunderstood and misrepresented Trump’s comments in a “media freakout” that was “not rooted in reality.” Cheung wrote: “He was clearly stating U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran hadn’t been stopped. America is safer because of the President.” He added that Iran “has no nuclear, no navy, no air force, and no money.”
Iran has said it isn’t pursuing nuclear weapons, though it has enriched uranium to near-weapons-grade levels that have no civilian purpose. Residents hear a threat described first as an acceptable price, then as a warning about a danger prevented. They don’t get to set the terms of that exchange.
Trump has often criticized U.S. cities while campaigning, particularly large areas that lean heavily Democratic. At a recent North Carolina rally, he called the state’s cities “blood-soaked killing fields.” FBI statistics put North Carolina’s violent crime rate in the middle third of states.
Federal Money as Leverage
The White House is also conditioning nearly $190 million in Smithsonian funding on compliance with Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” A fiscal-year-2027 footnote applies to funds carried over from last year in two of the Smithsonian’s main salaries and expenses accounts. It says: “To the extent permitted by law, amounts apportioned shall be available for obligation in a manner consistent with Executive Order 14253 (March 27, 2025), ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.’”
Public records show the footnote in two recent apportionments of federal funds. The White House’s Office of Management and Budget is using the condition to influence how the Smithsonian tells the American story. The executive order accuses the institution of spreading “divisive narratives.”
Trump has also tried to fire a Smithsonian museum director on social media, ordered warning signs placed outside its American-history museum and demanded that the museum remove a modernist sculpture he dislikes. A letter from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum revealed new details about warning signs the White House plans to install near the museum. The funding condition adds a budget lever to those demands: access to nearly $190 million depends on an executive order about historical interpretation.
The political objections in the account come from a Democratic governor and a Republican congressional nominee, while the White House and federal funding machinery exert institutional pressure. No grassroots organizing or mutual-aid response appears in the account. What it does show is power moving downward through public rhetoric and money: cities cast as potential losses, and a cultural institution facing a funding condition as it decides how to tell history.