Trump suggests he would let Iran ‘take out’ Los Angeles or San Diego

There's a peculiar cognitive dissonance in hearing a head of state casually suggest that foreign adversaries could "take out" a city—as if Los Angeles and San Diego were mere props in a revenge fantasy, not home to nearly 20 million souls. As a science journalist, I've spent years contemplating cosmic scales: asteroids, supernovae, the eventual heat death of the universe. But here's the thing—the most terrifying destructive forces aren't always astronomical. Sometimes they're human, and they come wrapped in a speech at a Nebraska rally. The weirdness here isn't just the political animus toward a blue state. It's the normalization of catastrophic thinking. We've built civilization's most intricate machinery—power grids, water systems, hospitals, fiber-optic networks—and yet a single sentence from a leader can reduce it all to a hypothetical smoking crater. In physics, we talk about entropy: the relentless march toward disorder. But this is something else—a deliberate injection of chaos into the social fabric, a thought experiment where cities are expendable. What's especially wild is how quickly we adapt to the surreal. A president suggesting Iran could "take out" LA would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Now it's just another headline, another cycle of outrage, another round of "deranged" and "reckless" from California's governor. But if we step back, we see the deeper pattern: the language of annihilation has become a rhetorical tool, a way to signal power by demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice. That's not strategy—it's a kind of collective madness, dressed up in the guise of toughness. And yet, there's a strange resilience in the human spirit. California has earthquakes, wildfires, and now this—the threat of being erased from the map by a political whim. The state keeps building, keeps dreaming, keeps pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Perhaps that's the ultimate weirdness: even as we talk about cities being "taken out," those cities are still full of people inventing the future, oblivious to the absurd theater around them. Reality, as ever, is stranger than fiction—and far more fragile. Source: [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/06/trump-suggests-let-iran-take-out-los-angeles-san-diego)