At a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday night, Donald Trump told supporters he hoped for a “tremendous victory” in November. He then described the high prices caused by the Iran war as a “small price to pay for keeping the world safe – keeping our country safe”. Moments later, speaking of Iran, he said: “They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego”. The crowd applauded. “It’ll be over very soon”, he added of the war.
The reaction in California was immediate. Governor Gavin Newsom called the president “deranged and dangerous” and said Trump was “advocating for an attack on 10+ million U.S. residents in two of America’s largest cities”. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass accused him of “irresponsible threats” that “could potentially compromise” the safety of the country’s second-largest city, adding that the role of a president is to protect the country, not to threaten it. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said his city was “not collateral damage” and “never a small price to pay”. Xavier Becerra, the Democratic nominee for governor, noted that 13 million Californians live in the two counties and that their lives are not “a punchline”.
What Trump meant is disputed. Online, the remarks, part of a rambling speech lasting nearly an hour and a half, set off a debate over whether they were a crude joke about two Democratic-run cities or an inadvertent hint about possible Iranian targets. Some conservative activists argued that, in his elliptical style, Trump was talking about gas prices when he said “small price to pay”, not about Iran’s ability to strike a US city. The White House did not immediately comment. One relevant fact is on the record: US defense officials have said Iran currently lacks the capability to launch a direct missile attack on the American mainland, even though Trump has argued that Iran would soon be able to reach US soil with missiles.
The rally says something about the state of the campaign. Nebraska is reliably Republican, yet an unexpectedly close Senate race there has rattled the party, and Trump used the stage to insist that he was “doing great” and to urge supporters to behave as if his name were on the ballot. In California, Trump has endorsed Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor, who is hoping for an upset. For a candidate in that position, a presidential riff that appears to shrug at an attack on the state’s biggest cities is plainly unwelcome. The episode shows how hard it is to run alongside a president whose improvised remarks can cut across the interests of the candidates he is trying to help.
The vice-president has been trying to repair the damage. On 15 September, JD Vance told voters: “There’s a lot of good that’s been done, but there’s a lot of work left to do… Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years”. He added that “even if you don’t agree with us on every issue, the other party is consumed by craziness”.
Critics read this as a plea for damage control that contains no acknowledgment of harm, no remorse and no pledge to change. It also casts Vance, as the heir apparent for 2028, in the role of the candidate who asks for forgiveness without admitting fault. Whatever one thinks of that reading, the structural problem is real: the argument “the other side is worse” is a defensive one, and it works best when the incumbent’s record is not itself the subject of the election.
The evidence that the appeal has not settled the party comes from Senate races. Mike Rogers in Michigan had said that limiting Trump’s war authority would “not be good for America” and had dismissed fuel-price concerns with “we got plenty of oil”. He has since said that “the best option now is to wind it down”. Iowa’s Ashley Hinson, who voted repeatedly against invoking the War Powers Resolution, now says the war must be brought to “a successful and immediate end”.
These are not full breaks. Neither candidate has said that any particular Trump policy was mistaken, and their main proposal, a ban on diesel exports, is one that the Financial Times reports “wouldn’t be workable” and could lead to later price spikes. Even so, the shift is politically revealing. When candidates who were in lockstep with the White House begin calling for a quick end to the war, they validate the anxieties of voters who already doubted it, and they make it harder for the party to argue that opposition to the war is a partisan or radical position.
Survey data points the same way. An Economist/YouGov poll taken as Vance was urging House Republicans to portray Democrats as “crazy” found that 51% of registered voters described Trump as “dangerous”, 53% as “corrupt” and 47% as “out-of-touch”, while only 18% chose “steady”. Vance’s own advice to Republicans facing a Democrat who is “not that crazy”, to talk about Abdul El-Sayed, who is polling ahead of Rogers in Michigan, implicitly concedes that many Democrats do not fit the caricature.
Taken together, the rally remark, the “another chance” appeal and the Senate candidates’ reversals describe a party defending a war it has not been able to end, in a month when its leader’s improvised comments keep complicating the task. That is consistent with the president’s record-low approval ratings elsewhere in this month’s polling and with the broader pressure on household costs. The campaign question, in short, is not whether Republicans can win an argument about Iran, but whether they can stop the argument from defining the election.
to be continued
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