Trump’s LA and San Diego comments ‘dangerous, if not treasonous’, says Newsom – US politics live

There is a peculiar kind of weirdness that emerges when political rhetoric brushes against the unthinkable. Trump's alleged comments about "letting" Iran take out Los Angeles or San Diego treat cities not as living ecosystems of millions of souls, but as abstract chess pieces on a geopolitical board. It's the kind of casual disregard for scale that physicists encounter when they zoom out to cosmic dimensions—except here, the scale is human, and the stakes are measured in lives, not light-years. What strikes me as truly bizarre is the cognitive dissonance involved. We can hold in our minds the simultaneous truths that these cities are irreplaceable cultural and economic hubs, and yet also that they are, in the grand scheme of things, tiny specks on a planet that has survived far worse. But as Carl Sagan reminded us, we are a way for the cosmos to know itself. When we casually discuss the erasure of a city, we are discussing the erasure of a part of that cosmic self-awareness. Newsom's accusation of "treasonous" behavior suggests he understands that this isn't just a political misstep—it's a violation of the implicit contract that leaders will treat the lives of their citizens as sacred, not as hypotheticals. The source article, a live blog from The Guardian, captures the fluid, almost chaotic nature of this story as it unfolds in real time. It's a reminder that our political reality is now generated in the same instant as our perception of it—a kind of observer effect that would make quantum mechanics blush. When a president's words can instantly trigger a state-level security response, we're no longer in the realm of traditional politics; we're in a feedback loop of threats, reactions, and counter-reactions that feels more like a simulation than a republic. Perhaps the deepest weirdness is this: we've normalized the language of apocalypse. "Take out a city" is now a phrase that fits comfortably in a political soundbite. But the physics of a nuclear or missile strike is not abstract. It's a flash, a wave, a silence. It's the sudden transformation of ordered complexity into chaos—something that would take a supercomputer to model, yet we discuss it with the casualness of a weather forecast. That disconnect, between the enormity of the event and the triviality of its utterance, is perhaps the strangest phenomenon of all.