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Almost Over
Within hours of a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday night, a clip was circulating of Donald Trump saying “Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.” The reaction was immediate and furious. California’s governor wrote that the President was saying America’s foreign enemies should take out the two cities and called him deranged and dangerous. Commentators described a President fantasizing about two American cities being wiped out. The outrage was understandable. Taken alone, the clip sounds like exactly that.
It is not what he said, and it is not what he meant.
I have no use for Donald Trump, and that is the reason the record has to be right. Read the full passage and the meaning is plain. Trump was defending the cost of the war, including the price of gasoline, as a small price to pay for keeping the country safe. The lines about Los Angeles and San Diego sit inside that argument. He was gesturing at what Iran could do to an American city if it were allowed to build a nuclear weapon, and at the pain at the pump being worth preventing that. He did not call for an attack on two American cities. He did not invite one. Anyone who says otherwise has put words in his mouth, and a man who deals in this much real material does not need to.
I hold him to the same standard I would ask his side to hold everyone else to, and they do not. Last November, six Democratic lawmakers released a video urging service members not to follow illegal orders, which they described as restating the law. Trump called it “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” A reminder of existing law was recast as a capital crime. The method is the same in both directions. A sentence is lifted from its setting, given the worst available meaning, and handed to people who will not read the rest.
What Trump did do is nearly as bad in a different way. A President speaking about nuclear stakes can say that a bomb in Iranian hands could destroy a city like Los Angeles. A competent speaker can do that in one sentence and leave no room to hear a dare. Trump delivered a warning and an invitation in the same grammar and left the audience to sort them apart. A man who carries the nuclear codes should not be producing sentences that need a defender’s translation. Speeches are work product. He chose to improvise this one, and the improvisation is his to own.
The sentence is the smaller problem. The larger one came in the same speech, when he told the crowd the war with Iran is “essentially almost over.”
On March 1, the day after the war began, Trump said the operation was intended to run four to five weeks. The next day he told reporters it would take four weeks or less. By late March he said the effort was a lot ahead of schedule. In April a ceasefire arrived, and within two weeks he was complaining on Truth Social that critics said he had promised six weeks. A memorandum to end the war was signed in June. By one account the ceasefire that followed collapsed on July 8 when Iran attacked commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Now it is October, more than seven months since the first strikes, and the President is telling a rally that it is almost over.
Nothing in the public record I could find supports that. There is no signed settlement holding, no announced withdrawal, and no definition from the White House of what “over” would mean. That last point is the one that matters. A war with no defined end can be almost over indefinitely.
His defenders have an answer, and it is not a foolish one. Wars slip. Timelines in the first week of any conflict are guesses. Defense Secretary Hegseth said himself that the dates could move up or move back, and Trump said from the start that the military had the capability to go far longer. The objective, preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, is serious, and a President is entitled to pursue it.
All of that can be true and the criticism still stands. Capability to go longer was said in a sentence. Four weeks or less was said in another, and it was the one the public heard. The short number is the one offered when asking for patience. The long number is the one paid in fact. A President can pursue a legitimate goal and still be held to account for what he told the country about its price.
The price is not abstract. At least 17 American service members had been killed and more than 420 wounded as of late July. In Iran, monitors counted at least 3,468 dead by the June memorandum, including hundreds of children. The Strait of Hormuz has been contested for months, and Americans have paid for it at the pump.
One strike carries more weight than the rest. On the first day of the war, a Tomahawk missile hit a primary school in Minab and killed more than 150 people, about 120 of them children. In mid-September, a United Nations fact-finding mission concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe the United States carried out that strike, and a second one on a sports facility in Lamerd, and that both amounted to the war crime of launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The mission found the school clearly identifiable as a civilian site. It said the failure to verify the target went beyond negligence and amounted to recklessness.
That is a finding, not a verdict. The mission cannot compel anyone to answer for anything, and it said the United States did not respond to its requests for information. The Pentagon opened its own investigation into Minab in March and has released no findings. Trump has said he believes Iran was responsible. The same UN mission found that Iranian authorities likely committed crimes against humanity in the crackdown on protesters, and that finding does not excuse what happened at the school. The questions it raises for an administration promising an early end are simple. Who ordered the strike, what was known about the target, and why has a country that says it is winning not answered for it in seven months?
A war can be fought for defensible reasons and be misrepresented anyway. Four to five weeks became seven months. Almost over has been the forecast the whole way, delivered by a man who has never said what finished looks like and has never been wrong in a way that cost him anything.
He keeps saying it is almost over because saying it is cheap. Cheap for him. Paid in full by everyone else.