In the new year, President Trump has fallen to a new low: Now he’s tweeting out threats of nuclear war.
Will Republicans in Congress ever call this president out? Now, more than ever, it is imperative that the House and Senate push forward without favor in their investigations of the Trump presidential campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, that they protect Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller from any effort by the administration to dismiss him, and that they — above all — get between Trump’s finger and the nuclear button.
EDITORIAL
Congress can do all that, though you know they won’t. The reality is that 2018 will be another year of living dangerously. We can only hope that Trump, so unnervingly unfit to be president, doesn’t pull our nation further down a rabbit hole this year or throw the world into war.
The stakes are that high.
On Tuesday, noting that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had claimed that a “nuclear button is on his desk at all times,” Trump tweeted that he had his own such button, one that was “much bigger & more powerful.”
The whole world shuddered. The commander in chief of the most powerful military in history had just blithely taunted a belligerently unstable dictator with Armageddon.
Our first reaction was to recall something David Axelrod, President Barack Obama’s former adviser, once said about Trump’s bizarre tweeting: “The words presidents speak or tweet or write can send armies marching and markets tumbling.”
Our second reaction was to lament the return of craziness after a rare few days of what felt almost like normalcy. Did you catch it? Between Christmas and New Year’s, while on vacation in Florida, Trump sometimes went whole days without saying or tweeting something stupid. It was odd, but nice.
Our third reaction was that there is something wrong with Trump. His behavior is consistently too bizarre to be calculated or even rational. Something is amiss.
How else does one explain Trump’s many baldly false assertions — stuff known to be untrue on the face of it — in an interview last week with the New York Times? He twice stated, among other whoppers, that “virtually every Democrat” has agreed there was no collusion between his campaign and Russia.
The truth, of course, is that leading Democrats by the dozens stand in front of cameras all the time — even on the cable news shows the president watches most — and demand that investigators get to the bottom of the collusion.
In a tweet on Tuesday morning, Trump claimed credit for a record year of global airline safety, though he had nothing to do with it. About 11 hours later, while closing in on a 17-tweet day, he threw in a trademark touch of reality show weirdness, announcing that next week he will name winners of “THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR.”
And an explosive new book, by journalist Michael Wolff, reveals a president who is horribly informed, intellectually disengaged and seething with resentments. He holes up in his White House bedroom for hours at a time to vent on the phone. He fishes for flattery and repeats himself constantly.
Trump has no internal regulator, which brings us back to this business of nuclear buttons.
By law, the president can launch a first nuclear strike without a declaration of war by Congress. But Congress is free to change that law and, lord knows, it should. Before Trump, or any president, can send nuclear missiles soaring on a first strike, the decision should be approved by Congress, as well as by the secretaries of defense and state. A Cold War protocol designed for speed should be revamped for greater checks and balances.
Trump is scaring the world, and that should scare us. He’s not the only world leader who lives on the edge of reason.
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