Part of America’s freedom is that we can elect our leaders.
That has downsides, although so far not enough to replace democracy with some other system. One of the bigger downsides is that you might get a leader like Trump. America’s voters should think hard before they do that again. That experiment, it seems, was a close shave.
I’m not talking today about Trump’s attempt to overthrow our democracy, or the actions of his deluded and violent followers who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and are now going to jail.
Today I’m going to talk about Trump’s fantasy of nuking North Korea and blaming it on another country.
Apparently he was serious and persistent enough about it to unnerve his chief of staff, John Kelly, a retired 4-star general. According to a new book, “Trump continued to talk as if he wanted to go to war” and Kelly had to keep talking him out of ordering a preemptive nuclear strike against North Korea by arguing he wouldn’t get away with blaming it on “another country” (read story here).
Holy shit, that was actually going on in the Oval Office. I knew Trump was a bad president, but I had no idea he was scheming something like this.
It also appears that Trump’s fantasies of this nature didn’t end with his presidency. Just last year, after Russia invaded Ukraine, he “reportedly told a room full of Republican … donors that the US should ‘put the Chinese flag’ on a bunch of military planes and ‘bomb the shit’ out of Russia — and afterward, ‘we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch’” (read about that here).
Some people complain Biden is bland and uninspiring, but I can do without this kind of excitement. A person’s fitness for office should always be foremost in voters’ minds. The only constitutional qualifications to be president are a natural-born citizen at least 35 years old, but the American people should demand a lot more than that of anyone with presidential aspirations.