It is absolutely absurd that people think Donald Trump sat down and decided he wanted Los Angeles and San Diego to get nuked.

That is where we are now. That is the level of reading we are operating at.

If you take words out of context, and I mean the way it gets done from a pulpit every Sunday morning, you can shape whatever argument you walked in already wanting. Give me one verse and no chapter and I will build you a doctrine. Give me half a sentence and a clip and I will build you a monster.

So let us do this properly. Here is what he actually said, word for word, the part everybody is passing around.

“It’s a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe. They can take out a city. Let them take, 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 going to be over with very soon.”

That is a direct quote. I am not shaving a word off it and I am not softening it. Read it as many times as you want.

Now do the thing nobody wants to do.

When I am working out whether something preached at me is false doctrine, I do not argue with the verse. I rewind. I read what came before it, and then I read what came after it, and nine times out of ten the problem solves itself right there in front of me.

Same method. Same five minutes of effort. Rewind the tape.

He was talking about the war in Iran driving up gas prices. That is the subject. That is what the whole stretch of the speech is sitting inside.

And gas prices in Los Angeles are ridiculous. They are ridiculous partly because the money people make out there runs on a scale that has nothing to do with the rest of this country, and New York is the only other place that comes close. A number that would start a riot in West Virginia is a Tuesday in California.

So the context was gas. Not cities. Gas.

Let me replay what the man was actually saying, with the pearls unclutched and the context put back where it belongs. Gas prices in LA going up is a side effect of the war in Iran. And that cost, as painful as it is at the pump, is a small price to pay to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

That is it. That is the whole thing. A man making the argument that a rough quarter at the gas station beats a nuclear-armed terror state, and a press corps that found two city names in the middle of it and built a headline out of them.

I expect that from them. They have been doing it since before I could vote and they will be doing it after I am gone. That is the job as they understand it.

What has me irritated is our own people.

I have watched MAGA folks I respect take this one straight down the hatch. Share it. Repost it. Add a line of commentary on top of it about how he has finally gone too far this time.

Nobody pulled up the speech. Nobody rewound thirty seconds. Everybody had an opinion and not one person had the transcript.

And I want you to notice how familiar that is. It is the same muscle that lets a man sit in a pew for twenty years, nodding along to a verse used sideways, because checking it himself would mean admitting he has been taking somebody else’s word for his own convictions.

You cannot be that easy to move. Not now.

If a headline makes you feel something in the first two seconds, that is not information. That is a door being held open for you, and somebody is standing on the other side of it waiting to see if you will walk through.

Rewind the tape. Every time. It costs you five minutes and it is the only thing standing between you and being somebody else’s instrument.