Column adds Hall County venue, flags contradictory Iran claims
The Guardian published an opinion column on October 7, 2026, in its “comment is free” section by Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, characterizing President Donald Trump’s Monday Nebraska rally speech as “beyond irresponsible.”
The column focused on Trump’s suggestion during the rally that allowing Iran to “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego would be “a very small price to pay” for keeping the country safe. According to the rally transcript quoted in the column, Trump told the audience: “They can take out a city. Let them take, let it, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. That’s, this is a very small price to pay, and it’s gonna be over very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”
The “take out” remarks came within a longer passage that began with Trump invoking “Kamala” — a reference to former Vice President Kamala Harris — and accusing her of having “stole a lot of things that didn’t work out too well.” Trump continued in the same passage: “But I want, I wanna see, I wanna see a tremendous victory. You wanna see a tremendous victory, because it verifies all the things we did. And again, remember, with the word, it’s just artificial, it’s a little bit high. It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.”
Widmer argued that the speech was so “delusional” that it had “almost no basis in fact at all.” He compared Trump’s discursive style to “scat singing as the president goes into his famous ‘weave,’ his word for the way he lurches from one half-formed thought to another, like a rodeo clown on a bucking bronco.”
Widmer identified a contradiction in Trump’s remarks. The president claimed simultaneously that Iran had been rendered “toothless” (“we’re kicking Iran’s ass”) and that it remained a lethal threat capable of destroying America’s second- and eighth-largest cities. “Which one is it?” Widmer wrote. “Over and over, we have heard that Iran’s nuclear program has been ‘obliterated.’ But if so, why are we still at war?”
On Iran’s capabilities, Widmer wrote: “Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, nor can its missiles reach the United States, on either the east or west coast.” He described discussing such an attack as “the height of irresponsibility” and noted that any nuclear attack on the United States would result in “an overwhelming counterattack,” adding: “It’s called deterrence.” “It is that knowledge — and the cautious way in which previous American presidents have talked about nuclear weapons — that has helped to preserve the peace all these years,” Widmer wrote.
The column drew a historical parallel to President John F. Kennedy’s Berlin speech. Widmer wrote that Trump’s “let them” phrasing “almost sounded like he was encouraging them to, as when John F Kennedy, in Berlin, held up that city as a model of courage and said: ‘Let them come to Berlin,’ in both English and German.”
Widmer situated the rally within a broader argument about American foreign policy. “It is inherently destabilizing when a nation’s leader cannot be trusted to make an accurate statement, and the situation is especially troubling when the nation is the United States, the defender of the rules-based order since 1945,” he wrote. He added: “We appear to be entering a new era, in which political desperation at home leads to increasingly unhinged threats abroad.”
California officials had already condemned the remarks on Monday. Governor Gavin Newsom denounced Trump as “deranged and dangerous.” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria “objected strenuously to putting their cities in harm’s way, even if only in his feverish imagination,” Widmer wrote.
The column supplied several factual details about the rally not included in earlier reporting. The event was held at the Nebraska State Fairgrounds in Hall County, which had a population of 62,895 in the 2020 census. Widmer wrote that “even farmers are wary of this war, which has raised the price of fertilizers and diesel.”
On the timeline of the conflict, Widmer wrote that “the conflict drags into its eighth month with no sign of resolution.” He noted that Trump had to “go into the reddest part of a red state to sustain his vanishing popularity.”
Widmer recorded several other elements of the speech. Trump called Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico “Alfred E Neuman” and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff “Pee-wee Herman” — remarks Widmer described as “the usual schoolyard insults.” Trump also engaged in “red-baiting, despite the fact that the cold war ended in 1991,” according to the column.
Trump said “We want honest” at one point in the speech, “confusingly,” according to Widmer, who added: “Yes, we do.” Widmer described the rest of the speech as “the usual farrago of distortions and lies, as the most casual effort to factcheck shows,” concluding: “But whether we are going to get it, is another question entirely.”
According to the column, Widmer is a former White House speechwriter, the editor of “American Speeches,” and the author of the recently published “The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text,” both published by the Library of America.