At 6:22 tonight, at the Pinnacle Bank Expo Center in Grand Island, Nebraska, the room filled with red hats and shirts suddenly went quiet. A minute later, the President of the United States of America pushed through the curtain and emerged onto the stage with newly dyed hair and thick orange makeup. As the music blared through the speakers, he slapped his right thigh over and over again as he made his way to the podium.
Standing there, he said something so horrifying that it is difficult to believe the words were actually said by an American president. He looked into the camera and told Iran, the country we are at war with, that they should blow up one of two American cities, potentially killing millions of people. “It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That’s a very small price to pay.”
What the President of the United States said tonight should disqualify him from the office he holds. No president, or any elected official for that matter, should hold any position in our government after saying something like this. It should be immediate grounds for impeachment and removal. There should never be a circumstance where the commander in chief can stand on a stage and tell a foreign enemy to destroy American cities and harm American citizens. We should never see a day where the man who has access to nuclear weapons would even think of saying what Donald Trump said.
What he said is how he truly feels. He thinks that millions of American lives are expendable, and he is fine with entire cities being sacrificed. In his eyes and heart, the deaths of the people there really are a small price he, himself, is willing to pay because he does not care about his country or the people he was elected to serve. Donald Trump cares about only one thing: himself.
What concerns me the most right now, in this moment, is that we have reached a place where the president can say something like this without the entire country erupting in outrage. We are not angry enough. Our elected officials are not angry enough. Every single lawmaker in this country, Republican and Democrat, should be standing up right now and saying this is unacceptable. They should all be issuing statements, making it beyond clear that we do not talk about American cities this way, and that we do not offer our own people to our enemies, whether he means it or not, whether he is joking or not. They need to demand action against this president for abandoning his most basic duty to the citizens he swore to protect. If this does not cross the line, there is no line.
The danger of this moment goes way beyond what he said, because he has the power to make decisions that can determine whether millions of people live or die. He is the one who can and has started wars, and he controls our nuclear arsenal. In a catastrophic event, the president must be able to communicate clearly. He also needs to be able to think precisely, understand the consequences of his decisions, and act decisively. Those are not optional capabilities when one person holds that much power. What we heard tonight proves that he cannot meet those basic requirements.
He might walk it back tomorrow and make excuses for what he said. He might deny he even said it. Maybe he meant every word of it, or maybe he genuinely does not care about the cities that didn’t vote for him. Or maybe what we heard tonight was simply a president speaking recklessly about the destruction of American cities without grasping, or without caring about the weight those words carry. Whatever the explanation, the words themselves do not change. The President of the United States stood on a stage and spoke about millions of Americans dying as a “small price to pay.”
I was born and grew up in Southern California. I’ve raised my children here, and we still live here. This is personal, but I would still feel this exact way had he named any other places. But when I heard him tell a cheering crowd that the cities where my daughters sleep should be destroyed and that it would be a very small price to pay, something inside me cracked open that I don’t think I can ever close again.
I was watching this speech live, and I actually ran into my husband’s office and had him listen to what he said to make sure there wasn’t something I was missing. Donald Trump has said some despicable things in the past, but even the most morally bankrupt among us know there is a line that cannot be crossed. Donald Trump does not.
When Pete confirmed that I had indeed heard Donald Trump correctly, I immediately thought about how San Diego County is home to some of the most critical military installations in the country. Naval Base San Diego, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, Camp Pendleton are all here in San Diego alone. There are tens of thousands of active duty service members and their families who live in the very counties he told Iran to take out. I thought of how he was offering to sacrifice their lives too. I thought about Los Angeles and how it is one of the most diverse cities on earth, a place built by generations of immigrants and their descendants, a melting pot of cultures and languages and communities. People who came to this country because they believed in its promise.
What Trump said about LA and San Diego goes even further than just his comments tonight. There is a real possibility that those two cities were not chosen at random. Because just four days ago we learned that Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney who he has now made the United States Attorney General, had five grand jury subpoenas sent to San Diego County election officials demanding voter registration records. The Los Angeles Times reported that LA County also received at least five of its own subpoenas for voter information this year as well.
The Brennan Center for Justice called these subpoenas “highly unusual” and described them as “part of a broader sweeping fishing expedition in order to try to identify and uncover elusive non-citizens who were inappropriately registered to vote.” A federal judge has already blocked the DOJ from using a federal database to search voter rolls, finding that officials had unlawfully shared Social Security records and risked misidentifying eligible voters. Taken together with the earlier ICE raids, the subpoenas and what Donald Trump just said about Iran and these Southern California counties, it is hard to see this as anything other than a coordinated retribution attack.
But even that was just a very small part of what Donald Trump said. His 1 hour and 23 minute speech was full of lies, rambling, and a very concerning level of cognitive deterioration. Donald Trump is doing what desperate people always do, but he is also falling apart in front of our very eyes.
At one point during the speech, Trump decided to bring up Ronald Reagan and how his slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was something that he had come up with himself in 2015. And then he added that “Somebody said no, that was Ronald Reagan. No, no, his was uh, ‘Let’s make America great.’ There’s a big difference. And he never used it too, so he didn’t.”
His thoughts and words were a bit garbled, but they were also 100% untrue. Ronald Reagan did use the phrase. “Let’s Make America Great Again” was one of his 1980 presidential campaign slogans. Trump took a slogan that had already been used by another Republican president, dropped the “Let’s,” built the entire MAGA political movement around it, and now he is insisting that somehow he invented it. It is such a small lie compared with everything else he said tonight, but it is also a perfect example of how Donald Trump operates. History becomes whatever he says it is, and the truth becomes whatever he needs it to be. And he expects everyone around him to just go along with it.
He spent time during his remarks boasting about Venezuela, saying, “1 hour and 48 minutes it took us. Nobody killed. Nobody killed. They don’t talk about that.” He was complaining about the “fake news,” or what he is now calling the “artificial news,” for never reporting all of his amazing accomplishments. But he conveniently left out the Americans who have died in his other war, the one in Iran that he doesn’t want to talk about. At least 19 American service members have been killed, and he didn’t mention a single one of them tonight.
His other big moment came when he announced an executive order expanding access to red-dyed diesel, a tax-exempt fuel used by farmers and off-road vehicles. Before getting on his plane to Nebraska, he was asked about red-dyed diesel and admitted he didn’t know anything about it. Hours later, he was signing an executive order about it, a policy written specifically for the agricultural audience sitting in front of him. But in true Donald Trump fashion, he managed to expose himself here too. Just as he was about to sign it, he said to the entire room, “Do you know what that is? I don’t know what the hell it is, but whatever it is, it’s supposed to be very good. Does anybody want to explain that?” He then signed it anyway without understanding what he was even doing.
Just as he was signing it, he turned to Senator Pete Ricketts and Governor Jim Pillen and said, “Pete and Jim, this should absolutely assure your election. I guarantee you that.” He didn’t even try to hide what he was doing right then, signing an executive order to help elect Republicans.
He also talked about sending federal money to Nebraska and how it feels like a personal favor he was doing for the governor and how much he doesn’t like to be asked for money. He made it a recurring theme throughout the speech, coming back to it multiple times. The first time, saying, “He calls me all the time, always looking for money for this state. I hate it.” He then imitated a phone call from Ricketts about flood relief. “Sir, it’s been horrible. We had a flood. Could you send us 25 million? I said to Pete, that’s a lot of money, but you know, I won it (Nebraska) three times. I say, the hell with it. Give him the money.” Later, he came back to it again. “He wants money every time it rains.” He described a request for drought relief the same way. “It’s a little, just a little money instead of a lot. He says it’s tremendous crop destruction. Please send us 5 million.” Federal disaster relief is not a gift from the president. It belongs to the people and is funded by taxpayers. The fact that he frames it as something he hands out because Nebraska voted for him tells every state that didn’t vote for him exactly where they stand in his eyes.
He also declared that he is the greatest president in American history. “I said, what about Washington and Lincoln?” he said of a supposed prior conversation. “And they say, you’re better, sir. You’re better.” He paused and smiled. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ll tell you, it got to be, cuz there has been no president that’s done more in the first two years than President Trump.”
The crowd chanted “four more years” at one point, and Trump leaned into it, saying that he has Trump 2028 hats just to antagonize the Democrats. “Oh, they go crazy. You know, we have a hat. It says four more years. Another one. Trump 2028… the radical left is going, ‘No, no, I’m telling you, he’s not going to leave. He’s not leaving… We’ve driven them crazy. They’re sick individuals.”
Throughout the speech, he continued to call Democrats, “dumocrats” and “communists.” He said he had “skipped socialism” and gone straight to communist. He used the word over and over, trying to make sure everyone would now consider every single Democrat a communist.
While Donald Trump was acting out his worst impulses in Nebraska, an interview that aired this past weekend on 60 Minutes was getting increasing attention. Thom Tillis, a Republican senator who decided not to run for reelection, has been making the rounds ahead of the release of his new book. During the interview, he said at least 30 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate have privately expressed serious reservations about Trump’s actions, but that the executive branch has stripped them of their independence by threatening primary challenges if they step out of line.
Tillis warned that without checks on that power, “we will have a sort of dictator king if we’re not careful.” He predicted an “electoral bloodbath” for Republicans in the midterms. When he was asked if he worries about how Trump might react to a bad election night, given what happened on January 6, Tillis said, “I think there’s a risk. I really do.”
They know. The Republicans cowering behind Donald Trump know what is coming. They must have also seen what he said tonight and watched more nails being driven into his political coffin while he was still talking. Donald Trump has promised more of these events ahead of the midterms. A lot more of them. And this is a good thing for those of us who love this country. We need him talking. We need as many people as possible to see the depths this man is willing to go to hold onto power, even if that means throwing his own fellow Americans at the feet of our enemies.
The walls continue to close in on Donald Trump. Nothing, not the polling numbers, the economy, or the growing cracks inside his own party, has been good for him. But this is all good news for us. Because it means we still have an opening. It means that if we show up and get enough people out to vote, we can slow down his destruction and begin the long process of rebuilding this country. It will not be quick, and it will not be easy. No single election can fix what has been broken. But it’s a start, and it is going to take every single one of us deciding that a president who tells a cheering crowd that our cities and the people living inside them are a small price to pay does not get to keep the Congress that enables him.
That is where our power is right now. It is in what we do over these next 29 days. It is in every door we knock on, person we talk to, voter we help get to the polls, and every single one of us refusing to believe that what we are watching can’t be stopped. Because we can stop it and we will. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: We are going through another heatwave with the temperature over 100 at our house. We’ve tried to go for a walk even later in the day, and it is just too hot. The pictures I took tonight on our latest attempt were completely blurry, but this was the scene. I’ve lived here my entire life, and I can’t remember us ever having these very long stretches of extreme heat like this.
Links to sources used in writing this article:
President Trump holds midterm rally in the red state of Nebraska: YouTube Video
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thom-tillis-60-minutes-transcript/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/senator-thom-tillis-60-minutes/
https://inewsource.org/2026/10/01/san-diego-county-doj-voter-information-subpoenas/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/attorney-general-todd-blanche-doj-state-voter-rolls-supreme-court-rcna592721
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again
https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/05/politics/donald-trump-nebraska-red-state-blitz
Thank you Heather . I have no words .
My stomach is in a knot and I am shaking .
This is beyond disturbing . Appreciate your ability to put this into a very comprehensive overview .
Tillis: “…but that the executive branch has stripped them of their independence by threatening primary challenges if they step out of line.”
They bent over backwards to willingly fellate the Gilded Toadstool©️hundreds if not thousands of times on Fox “News” and in the MSM. They have abrogated their responsibilities. They have given up any semblance of intelligence and integrity to fall in line with the Malignant Narcissist in Chief.
There MUST be a Nuremberg v.2 trials in 2029. No “let bygones be bygones” or “move forward” bullshit. They must be taken to account for sullying this great nation.