On Monday night in Grand Island, Nebraska, Donald Trump was trying to convince a tiny rally crowd to vote Republican when, as he is wont to do, he wandered off-prompter into a riff about what Iran could do to two American cities and the crowd cheered:
“They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay and it’s going to be over very soon.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom said:
“Donald Trump’s remarks were dangerous – if not treasonous – putting a target on two of our biggest cities and one of America’s largest naval hubs.”
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the remark could compromise her city’s safety, and the Republican running to represent San Diego in the US House, Jim Desmond, said:
“No American city is expendable, and no American family should ever be treated as collateral damage.”
The White House tried spinning it all, claiming Trump only meant that a (fantasy) nuclear-armed Iran would’ve threatened those cities if he hadn’t gone to war against them first. Maybe so. Forbes magazine — nobody’s idea of a lefty outlet — instead reported that it’s unclear whether he was warning about an attack or daring Iran to launch one.
And then Trump repeated his language again last night in Texas, saying:
“And I said it the other day, let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles on the way. You want to see a horror show? Let them hit San Diego. Let them hit Los Angeles.”
Trying to read Trump’s twisted mind is a dangerous effort, but we can look at what politicians in positions similar to him have done in the past, as well as checking out whether he’s trying to strengthen or weaken our ability to prevent such an attack.
Back in March of 2003, as George W. Bush was about to invade Iraq, I wrote an essay called “When Democracy Failed” detailing how Hitler used the burning of the German parliament building to consolidate his power.
While the history is still debated, historian Benjamin Carter Hett builds a compelling case that the Nazis essentially set up the 24-year-old (perhaps mentally ill) Dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe to do it, or even started the fire themselves. Hitler, standing in front of the smoldering building, told a British reporter, “This is a signal from God,” and by the next day he had his Reichstag Fire Decree pushed through parliament, suspending civil liberties across Germany, creating an instant police state.
It turns out that this meme — a foreign attack that rescues or expands the powers of a political leader — is one of the oldest stories in politics, including American politics:
— President James Polk was incredibly unpopular in 1846 (and since!), so he sent American troops into Mexican territory; when they were predictably fired on, Polk gave a speech to Congress claiming that Mexico had “shed American blood upon American soil.” It was such an obvious attempt to start a war to rescue Polk’s sagging fortunes that freshman congressman Abraham Lincoln introduced his Spot Resolution to try, unsuccessfully, to stop what quickly became the Mexican-American War.
— When the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor in 1898, most likely from a fire in a coal bunker next to her magazine, newspaper oligarch William Randolph Hearst sent a cable to the artist Frederic Remington at Havana: “Please remain [in Cuba]. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.” Within weeks we were at war with Spain, dramatically boosting the popularity of President McKinley and setting the stage for Teddy Roosevelt’s rise to power.
— In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually put it in writing. Operation Northwoods proposed the US military covertly blow up an American ship and stage a terror campaign in Miami and Washington, DC so America could blame Castro and invade Cuba; it was only scuttled because President Kennedy said no.
— Two years later, Lyndon Johnson and Secretary off Defense Robert McNamara claimed an August 4 attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin that the National Security Agency’s own historian later concluded never happened. McNamara had wanted the war, and some historians even assert he lied about the attack to Johnson for weeks until the war against Vietnam was underway.
— In the summer of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt froze Japan’s assets and cut off its oil, knowing fully that he was backing Tokyo into a corner. While Republicans claimed he knew the attack on Pearl Harbor would come out of it, the evidence for that is sketchy; nonetheless, it provided the rationalization to enter World War II, which by then Roosevelt had concluded was necessary to save European democracy even though US public opinion was largely against the war (there was a large “America first” political movement that explicitly embraced Hitler and opposed entering the war).
— Two years before 9/11, George W. Bush told his ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz, that if he ever got the chance to invade Iraq he wouldn’t waste the political capital a war would give him the way his father had.
A year later, the Project for the New American Century, whose founding statement his brother Jeb had signed, published a report arguing that invading Iraq and taking their oil wasn’t politically possible unless “some catastrophic and catalyzing event” like “a new Pearl Harbor” were to happen.
Then on August 6, 2001, while he was vacationing in Crawford, the CIA flew an agent all the way to Texas to hand President George W. Bush a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in US.” Bush began the longest vacation in presidential history, refusing to return to DC but also refusing to pull together his team to stop the plot. Five weeks later, nearly 3,000 Americans were dead, his approval rating zoomed from 51 to 90 percent (the highest Gallup has ever recorded), and he got the war he’d told Herskowitz about.
This “let them attack us and I’ll become the hero against them” strategy works overseas, too.
— Vladimir Putin (Trump’s mentor, whom he called yesterday to wish a happy birthday) was an obscure prime minister in September of 1999 when apartment buildings started blowing up across Russia, killing around 300 people. When local police in the city of Ryazan caught Putin’s secret police/FSB agents planting a bomb in a basement, the Kremlin claimed it was just a “training exercise.” Putin used the terror from the Chechen attacks to start a war in Chechnya that he rode straight into the presidency.
— In Israel, the military had Hamas’s battle plan for October 7, a document they code-named “Jericho Wall,” more than a year before the attack. Benjamin Netanyahu’s poll numbers were in free-fall, but the attack and his response of bombing the hell out of Gaza both boosted his popularity and postponed his trial for corruption and bribery, keeping him in office.
Which brings us back to Donald Trump, who’s less than four weeks from a midterm election that looks like it’s going to be a screaming disaster for Republicans. He knows that if Democrats take the House or Senate, his life (and that of Uday, Qusay, and Jared) will become a living hell.
On September 26, Trump flat-out rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within seven days and restart talks; the Wall Street Journal then, shockingly, reported he’d privately told aides that he plans to get his revenge for his war humiliation by bombing Iran again after the election. He said much the same to Time magazine last week, causing some to wonder if he’s deliberately trying to provoke Iran into attacking the US now.
Meanwhile, the people who are supposed to catch Iranian operatives inside the United States have been pulled off the job. Just days before the war began in February, Ka$h Patel fired a dozen agents and staff from CI-12, the specific FBI counterintelligence unit that tracks threats from Iran.
Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi warned that nearly a quarter of the FBI’s agents, and up to 40 percent in the biggest field offices (like LA and San Diego?), were pulled onto immigration duty. This included huge numbers of counterintelligence specialists with deep expertise on Iran, and The Intercept found in May that none have been replaced or put back on Iran/terrorism watch.
And the threat of an Iranian attack on US assets is real. Ten days ago British police arrested five men near RAF Fairford, the base American bombers use to hit Iran. British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says there are “strong indications“ Tehran had a hand in it, although this is an evolving story.
Given all this, Trump has some explaining to do:
— Has Trump been briefed on a specific threat to Southern California, and if he has, what’s being done about it?
— Why were the FBI’s Iran specialists fired or relocated on the eve of a war with Iran, and how many of our top counterterrorism agents are still out rounding up brown-skinned day laborers?
— Why did he turn down an offer to reopen the Strait while, at the same time, provocatively promising more bombing after the election?
— And it’s not like the idea hasn’t occurred to Trump: Back when Barack Obama was running for reelection Trump tweeted on November 29, 2011: “In order to get elected, BarackObama will start a war with Iran.” Two weeks earlier he’d posted a video saying that starting a war with Iran was “the only way he figures that he’s going to get reelected.”
The following July he claimed Obama was “preparing a possible attack on Iran right before November,” and on October 9, 2012, with the election a month away, he told his followers that with Obama’s poll numbers falling they should “watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran.”
The last thing in the world that I’d hope for is that Trump is actually encouraging a massive attack on Los Angeles and San Diego just to rescue himself and his party politically. But having lived through 9/11, the subsequent Patriot Act and Bush lying us into two wars to get himself re-elected in 2004 — and having written these sort of histories for decades — I can’t dismiss it.
Congress can get answers to every one of those questions if enough of us insist. Call the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your representative and both of your senators that you want Kash Patel under oath about who’s actually guarding this country, that you want those agents back on counterterrorism now, and that you want a public commitment that no attack — no matter how terrible — will be used to delay or federalize the November 3 election.
Then check your registration at vote.org, make a plan to vote, and bring somebody with you.
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