At a political rally in Nebraska last night, president Trump made the astonishing suggestion that he would “Let Iran take out Los Angeles or San Diego… It would be a small price to pay”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eltBhn7WV4

The context was that Trump was trying to defuse concerns that many Republican voters currently have about the impact of the Iran war in raising the price of their fuel and groceries. The president was trying to assure his audience that the economic hurt was a small price to pay for ensuring that “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon”.

Trump then went off on a tangent about another “small price” he would apparently be prepared to pay - that of allowing Iran to destroy two of California’s largest cities - a suggestion that this Republican audience cheered to the rafters.

The most charitable assumption is that Trump was thinking of the plot of a Sidney Lumet film called “Fail Safe (1964).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_Safe_(1964_film)

In this Cold War thriller, Henry Fonda plays a US President who has to make a terrible decision to sanction the destruction of New York in order to prevent an all-out thermonuclear war, after US bombers have mistakenly destroyed Moscow.

Los Angeles and San Diego have a population of some 10 million people. I have family and friends in both cities and have visited both of them on a number of  occasions - so I’m not inclined to countenance  or excuse Trump’s remarks under any circumstances. But I’m curious to know what others make of them ?

56 minutes ago, toucana said:

“Let Iran take out Los Angeles or San Diego… It would be a small price to pay”

I'm guessing that these cities are not dyed in the wool Republican strongholds. Or maybe not uniformly WASPish?

Sounds rather like wishful thinking... some dotard letting slip the quiet stuff out loud.