Maybe you’ve read about Donald Trump’s recent riffs about how losing Los Angeles or San Diego in a nuclear attack by Iran would be an acceptable loss. Maybe, if you’re the kind of person who gets their news by watching videos, you’ve even heard it from his stupid, stupid lips. How could he even joke about such things blah blah blah.
I don’t try to respond to every stupid or evil thing he says and does because I would never have time for anything else. But as a San Diegan, I certainly owe Trump a sincere, heartfelt, and public fuck you for this one. I also want everybody else to know and/or remember that there is a reason Trump says things like this: he is a dipshit, and his political base is made up of dipshits. His favorite dipshits are the kind of tough-talking cowards who think California is lunatic asylum, and that every resident of a town with a population of more than 10,000 is either trying to mug them or judge them for wearing muddy boots inside the house.
No president has ever disrespected rural America as much as this president has publicly disrespected America’s cities, and he does this because despite being a privileged and elite city dweller himself, his fellow urbanites know that he’s a dipshit. In his dipshit heart he identifies with the sheer resentment felt by the kind of person who thinks that being outvoted by city folk is “cheating” because there are more of them. Of course, Trump has nothing but contempt for his base, but he knows they love to idly fantasize about cities being wiped off the map, and he has no problem indulging their fantasies.
So no, I’m not surprised, and I’m not more worried than usual. Yes, this kind of rhetoric probably does make Southern Californians less safe, but he makes every American less safe by a thousand other means every single day—most notably by giving Iran more incentive to try and build a nuclear weapon than it has ever had before. His is the logic of a dipshit, who believes the path to security lies in reckless bravado. He will continue to follow this path for as long as we let him.
Incidentally, I was back in America’s Finest City about a month and a half ago. It was beautiful, I had a wonderful time, and I didn’t even need to carry a gun around to make me feel safe whenever I heard somebody speaking Spanish. Yes, that was flippant of me just now, but I mean this next part in all seriousness: San Diego, California is where I was born and raised, and it is the first place I think of when I think of America. I don’t think it’s too much to ask of America’s president that he should care about the wellbeing of the millions of Americans who live in and around that city. If he can’t, well, I have a word for him.
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