The world’s most powerful man ignited a stunning new showdown with North Korea late Tuesday, as Donald Trump boasted to volatile leader Kim Jong Un that he had a “much bigger & more powerful” nuclear weapon.
Trump’s flippant comments about his nuclear prowess — akin to “mine is bigger than yours” schoolyard taunts — raise new questions about whether the President has thought deeply about the awesome destructive power at his command.
His outburst also elevates Kim, leader of an impoverished autocracy using a nuclear program to ensure its survival, to a tit-for-tat confrontation alongside the President of the United States.
“Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” Trump tweeted.
The tweet was remarkable not just for its content but for the fact it was generated by a President, the holder of the office that for decades has been the effective guarantor of a US-enforced 70-year era of global peace.
Other US presidents have privately considered the use of nuclear weapons since Harry Truman unleashed the horrific wrath of atomic warfare on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II in 1945.
But before Trump, no US President has made such public and cavalier threats, apparently relishing the power he wields as the person who could, by himself, deploy America’s earth-shattering nuclear arsenal within a matter of minutes.
Trump’s gambit is all the more risky since it is likely to alienate US allies, anger key world powers like Russia and China that Washington needs to resolve the standoff and because no one knows how the unpredictable Kim will respond.
“To call it juvenile would be an insult to children for what he did tonight,” retired Adm. John Kirby, a former State Department and Pentagon spokesman told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday.
“I do think in the halls of the Pentagon and the State Department, there has got to be a lot of concern over this, because he is the President of the United States. His tweets are going to be taken as official policy,” said Kirby, now a CNN analyst. “There is no question they are going to lead to miscalculation and confusion over there.”
Trump’s salvo raised questions about how far he appreciates the gravity of the standoff with North Korea that Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Sunday is heading ever closer to nuclear war.
It will inevitably ratchet up fears in Northeast Asia that raging tensions between the US and North Korea could trigger a miscalculation that could quickly lead to the most ruinous conflict in many decades.
And his intervention also appears likely to undermine what has been his successful effort to get world powers to line up alongside the US to impose themes punitive sanctions yet on the Stalinist North.
The President hit back after Kim’s New Year’s message, in which he warned that he had a nuclear button on his desk “at all times.”
Trump’s move was remarkable on many levels.
It’s one thing to get in a pissing contest, it’s another to get in a pissing contest with Nukes. ‘Dickfarm Don’ is batshit crazy, and his tweet could easily set “Rocket Man” off to actually hit his Nuke button and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
And these fucks just joke about it via these wack ass tweets.
The almost 100,000,000 people who voted for Trump should be ashamed of themselves.
What the fuck were they thinking?
Shug McSween
Shug McSween is a veteran here at DeanBlundell.com and has been contributing since day one. A sports nut with a sophisticated opinion, expect McSween to cover any and everything he's passionate about. When he's not busy writing and editing for our crew, McSween likes to get away via fairways and greens. He also contributes to The Hockey Writers, NHLTradeRumors.me and BballRumors.com
