Speaking at a midterm rally in Grand Island, Nebraska, on Monday night, Donald Trump told the crowd that the higher prices from his war on Iran are "a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe." Then he showed what that price was being weighed against.

"They could take out a city," he said. "Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay." The crowd applauded. He moved on without pausing.

Read as kindly as possible, as a claim that the war is what stops such an attack, it still leaves a sitting president at a campaign event asking voters to picture two of their own cities destroyed, around five million people between them, with the cost of a tank of fuel on the other side of the scale. He called the price rises "just artificial." He said Iran has "a big threshold for pain," that the war would end "very soon," and that it would end "one way or the other." He did not say what the other way would be.

That is the kind reading. Now read it the way his own party reads everyone else.

A sitting president, in the middle of a war, stood in front of a cheering crowd and said of the enemy he is fighting: let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego. He did not say the war would stop them. He said let them, and called it a small price.

Imagine Barack Obama saying it. Imagine Joe Biden. Republicans would not have gone looking for the charitable version. They would have called it what it sounds like: a commander in chief inviting a foreign enemy to strike American cities, and treason. There would have been articles of impeachment before he left the stage. This is the party that spent weeks on Obama's tan suit.

Trump gets the kind reading by default, every time, from the same people who would have demanded the other one from anyone else. The words are the same either way.

California's governor, Gavin Newsom, answered within hours: "After sending the National Guard and Marines to occupy California, Donald Trump is now saying our foreign enemies should 'take out' Los Angeles and San Diego. He is deranged and dangerous."

Later in the same speech he turned to immigrants. "We don't want to be discriminatory at all," he said, "but you could look at some of them and say, man, that's a rough group." The disclaimer and the thing it disclaims come in the same breath, and what he describes is judging people by how they look. It is not a policy statement. It tells the people who carry out the policy what he expects of them.

Ten years in, it is easy to file this as Trump being Trump. Don't. Los Angeles and San Diego are home to five million Americans, and their president called them a small price to pay.