Apparently Trump O’Clock came while I was busy writing about humans incinerating the earth. It turns out that Donald Trump is thinking along the same lines:
North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and, as I said, they will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.
I’m not quite as worried by this as some people. Trump blusters this way routinely, and anyway, he’ll probably consider anything he does to be so heroic that it’s unlike anything the world has seen. Just yesterday, referring to a fairly routine bit of resume fudging that was exposed a decade ago, he tweeted, “Never in U.S. history has anyone lied or defrauded voters like Senator Richard Blumenthal.” Uh huh. Plus Trump is surrounded by advisors who can probably keep him in line.
The bigger worry is the one I talked about a few days ago: that all the pressure over North Korea might prompt Trump to do something stupid. This in turn might provoke North Korea into launching an attack first. If they decide that Trump is serious, it might seem the best option.
I don’t think that will happen either. Kim Jong-un isn’t crazy, he just likes to act that way. He’s probably completely rational, in the same murderous kind of way that Josef Stalin was. He might bluster like Trump, but he knows perfectly well that any war involving the United States would end with the obliteration of his country.
All that said, this represents one of the reasons that Trump is so much worse than garden variety Republicans. With, say, Ted Cruz in office, I think there’s a 0 percent chance of nuclear war. With Trump in office there’s a 1 percent chance. That’s not much, but it’s 1 percent more than I’d like.
