President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I guess she’ll just have to learn on the fly about how to live in the public eye.

 

...as only a stable genius can.

 

Are you saying a meeting chaired by the President left observers confused as to his stance on something?

 

Complete this sentence

___________ is to President Trump as Fox News was to President Obama.

 

So here's what I'm worried about today: North Korea. This was triggered by this story in Foreign Policy, which to my knowledge is a reasonably respected and not over-the-top partisan magazine:

It's Time to Bomb North Korea

It advocates, as you might guess, bombing North Korea's nuclear sites now, before they develop the ability to strike our mainland. Part of the argument is simply chilling. To wit:

It’s true that North Korea could retaliate for any attack by using its conventional rocket artillery against the South Korean capital of Seoul and its surroundings, where almost 20 million inhabitants live within 35 miles of the armistice line. U.S. military officers have cited the fear of a “sea of fire” to justify inaction. But this vulnerability should not paralyze U.S. policy for one simple reason: It is very largely self-inflicted.

Yes, that last part means what you think it means. The author spends the next three graphs explaining in detail how South Korea has done a crappy job moving people away from the border, building bomb shelters, etc., as military analysts (including him) advised 40 years ago. Therefore they will have nobody to blame but themselves for dying in large amounts under any North Korean bombardment that would likely follow any American bombardment of North Korea; we shouldn't worry about it. I don't think that's even hyperbolizing his view:

Nonetheless, given South Korea’s deliberate inaction over many years, any damage ultimately done to Seoul cannot be allowed to paralyze the United States in the face of immense danger to its own national interests, and to those of its other allies elsewhere in the world.

This author's view is, by multiple accounts, generally shared by some key decision-makers in the Trump administration, especially by some of the generals who, let's be frank, actually run much of our foreign policy (led by Mattis and McMaster). Here's an alarming story from last month by Dan Drezner, an Asia expert and graduate of America's finest school, Williams College (full disclosure: I'm an alum):

Tell me how Trump's North Korea gambit will end

IMO, the biggest risk of Trump's absurd Twitter-baiting of Kim Jong Un isn't that it will directly lead to nuclear war. Rather, it raises the temperature significantly and helps make the "It's Time to Bomb North Korea" option seem like the reasonable alternative to Trump's "I Wanna Press My Huge Nuclear Button" idiocy, rather than a relatively extreme and dangerous position. Trump's idiotic, personal, and public nuclear brinksmanship shifts the options being seriously considered materially toward the more invasive and boom-boom. And once the (conventional) bombs start flying, who knows where it goes with a paranoid, isolated, nothing-to-lose regime like North Korea. Plus, oh yeah, thousands of South Koreans probably die, but hey, it's their fault, amirite?

Happy Hump Day!

[I know, tl;dr]

 

Empircal reality

 

Shut it down, game's over.

 

Do these people possess no sense of irony?

 

I read his post and immediately thought, "it's a cookbook!".

 

Read the thread.

 

Sneaky! (((Dianne Feinstein)))

 

The upshot of yesterday’s Trump Show: Somewhat stable, far from a genius. He exposed himself as clueless about not only policy, but also what he stands for. He didn’t drool himself, which I guess is a “win” for him. His bar is low.