Let Them Take Out Los Angeles: Trump's Remark and the White House's Answer
President Trump's comments about Iran produced a line that traveled: "Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego." White House communications director Steven Cheung pushed back on the criticism on X, saying the president was clearly stating that U.S. cities would have been threatened if a nuclear Iran had not been stopped, and that America is safer because of the president.
Cheung's version is a translation act. It recasts the sentence as a counterfactual about a threat that was averted, with American cities as the potential victims of an Iran that was stopped. The sentence as spoken, though, names those cities in the imperative: let them take them. Which reading should govern is now the argument — a strange thing for a presidential remark to require.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Cheung's reading makes the cities would-be victims rather than offered-up targets: they would have been threatened had a nuclear Iran not been stopped.
That reading has to survive the sentence itself. "Let them take out Los Angeles" is not the grammar of a warning; the word doing all the work is "let."
What's telling is that a rebuttal was needed at all. The plain reading was evidently the one that had to be answered.