Ron Reagan condemns Trump’s comments on Iran strikes as ‘Not Normal’

Ron Reagan, the son of former President Ronald Reagan, sharply criticized President Donald Trump on Friday for remarks suggesting Iran could “take out” Los Angeles and San Diego, calling the comments part of a broader pattern of abnormal behavior that Americans must not accept.

In a Substack essay published Friday, Reagan wrote that Trump’s remarks at a Nebraska rally earlier this week represented a fundamental break from presidential conduct.

“I can accept that Trump laughing about L.A. getting nuked by Iran is what passes for humor in his twisted limbic system,” Reagan wrote. “But there are certain things presidents simply shouldn’t say. High on that list are jokes about the incineration of millions of your fellow citizens.”

Trump made the comments Monday during a rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, while discussing the costs of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran.

The president said higher gasoline prices were “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe” and then added: “They can take out a city. Let them take — let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.”

The White House said Tuesday that Trump was taken out of context and was arguing that his administration’s military action had prevented a nuclear Iran from threatening American cities.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung called the media response “not rooted in reality.”

California officials condemned the remarks. Gov. Gavin Newsom called Trump “deranged and dangerous.”

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said the president’s role “is to protect the country, not to actively threaten it” . San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria wrote on social media that his city was “not collateral damage” and “not expendable.”

In his essay titled “Not Normal,” Reagan, a political commentator and son of the 40th president, did not directly address the White House’s interpretation of Trump’s remarks.

Instead, he used the episode as a launching point to catalogue what he described as a series of abnormalities defining Trump’s presidency.

“There’s a sense of oppressive weirdness, but it’s a fire hose of weirdness that overwhelms the synapses,” Reagan wrote. “We grow tired and then apathetic, which we can ill-afford to do.”

Reagan listed among the “not normal” items: a president who “spent years palling around with a child sex-trafficker,” a family treating the presidency as “a gigantic grift,” and an administration where “presidential family members and various other envoys are mixing United States foreign policy with private business ventures.”

He also cited Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his liability for sexual assault, and what Reagan described as plans to tear down part of the White House “so he can build a gigantic monument to himself. With an underground bunker. And sniper’s nests.”

Reagan, who has been an outspoken critic of Republican presidents since his father’s death in 2004, wrote that the accumulation of such episodes threatens to numb the public.

“The question remains, What are we going to do about it?” he wrote.

Ron Reagan is a liberal political commentator and author of “My Father at 100.” He lives in Seattle.