{"id":491811,"date":"2026-10-10T18:54:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-10T18:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/491811\/"},"modified":"2026-10-10T18:54:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-10T18:54:13","slug":"trump-often-off-script-keeps-on-bringing-up-hits-on-san-diego-and-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/491811\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump, often off script, keeps on bringing up ‘hits’ on San Diego and Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"President<\/a>President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026, where he again discussed San Diego and potential attack. (Photo by Eric Gay\/AP)<\/p>\n

President Donald Trump on Friday revisited his controversial comments<\/a> about a potential Iranian attack on San Diego and Los Angeles, insisting that his administration would protect all American cities.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Trump suggested that Iran could \u201ctake out\u201d San Diego or Los Angeles with a nuclear weapon. In San Antonio Wednesday and in Washington on Friday, he offered additional context, at times seeming to roll back his comments, and at others appearing to double down.<\/p>\n

Trump mockingly said<\/a> on Friday that since the event in Nebraska, journalists reported\u00a0 \u201c\u2018oh he said they\u2019re gonna hit Los Angeles.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would have probably hit places like San Diego, Los Angeles first because the route for a missile is much more convenient,\u201d he said of Iran at a White House event on Friday.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to a transcript of Trump\u2019s original remarks on Tuesday in Nebraska, here\u2019s what led to and followed the controversial line:<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to see a tremendous victory. You want to see a tremendous victory because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the war, it\u2019s just artificial. It\u2019s a little bit high. It\u2019s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, let them out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego. That\u2019s \u2013 this is a very small price to pay, and it\u2019s going to be over with very soon. It\u2019s essentially almost over with.\u201d<\/p>\n

As headlines started pouring out from news outlets across the country on Wednesday \u2013 and Gov. Gavin Newsom and elected officials in San Diego and Los Angeles condemned his remarks \u2013 Trump Administration argued the president\u2019s remarks were being taken out of context. Rather than inviting an attack on two California cities, they argued, he was saying that temporary high gas prices were a small price to pay compared to a potential attack if he had not gone to war with Iran.<\/p>\n

Trump dodged the topic<\/a> on Wednesday, even when reporters in a gaggle asked what he meant by his statement. Yet at a Ken Paxton campaign event in Texas, he briefly tried to contextualize his remarks to a group of like-minded Republicans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to let that happen,\u201d Trump said. \u201cWe protect our cities. We protect our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same speech, Trump reemphasized his points about Southern California.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou wanna see trauma? You wanna see problems? And I said it the other day \u2018Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles,\u2019\u201d he said at a campaign event for Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton. \u201cYou want to see a horror show? \u2026 You want to see a country that would be in freefall?\u201d<\/p>\n

The president\u2019s way of speaking makes it so \u201cthere is no possible way to linguistically interpret Trump\u2019s two statements as representing a consistent stance,\u201d said Jennifer Sclafani, an assistant professor of applied linguistics at UMass Boston, in a statement to Times of San Diego.<\/p>\n

\u201cTrump\u2019s tendency to speak in this style when discussing serious issues is, on one hand, essentially a way to stay true to his \u2018brand\u2019 as a politician, but in contexts like this, it also works in terms of maintaining plausible deniability,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump is known for straying from his prewritten remarks \u2014 even doing so at the event in Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope you don\u2019t mind my getting off script. I\u2019ve basically been off script for the entire night,\u201d he said at the event.<\/p>\n

Sclafani said Trump doesn\u2019t follow linguistic norms: often jumping from topic to topic, mixing serious talk with \u201cwhat he considers \u2018jokes\u2019\u201d or making provocative claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201c(H)e\u2019s established a pattern that leads us to believe we should never take his words at face value. That way, he can choose when he wants to mean what he says \u2014 which is whenever it works for him politically,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

At the White House event on Friday, Trump repeated remarks<\/a> that Iran was only \u201ctwo weeks\u201d from having a nuclear weapon and said his war stopped it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we hadn\u2019t attacked them with the B2 bombers early on, they were two weeks away \u2013 maybe three weeks away \u2013 from having a nuclear weapon,\u201d Trump said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump is set to make another campaign appearance in Tennessee this weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally at the Freeman Coliseum in San Antonio, Wednesday, Oct. 7,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491812,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[536,19378,47,74,76,75,2805],"class_list":["post-491811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-los-angeles","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491811\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491812"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}