[ExI] Trump asks "​Why Can’t We Use Nuclear Weapons?​"​

John Clark johnkclark at gmail.com
Wed Aug 3 19:47:13 UTC 2016


On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 12:31 PM, Darin Sunley <dsunley at gmail.com> wrote:

​> ​
> If the "serious" politicians, on both sides of the aisle, wanted us to be
> able to take seriously the idea that a presidential candidate like Trump
> could be an existential threat to the country, they probably shouldn't have
> spent the last three decades describing, in turn, Ronald Reagan, Bill
> Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama as similar existential threats.
>

​There is no point in pretending that Trump is just another presidential
candidate, he isn't. George W Bush was as dumb as a sack of rocks and the
worst president in my lifetime but he was sane, I don't think Trump is. If
we have another Cuban Missile Crisis,  if President Trump has to decide
between being personally embarrassed and causing the extinction of the
human race I don't think he will even hesitate, he will reach for his Red
Telephone.       ​


​> ​
> "But this guy's /really, really/ bad!" just isn't terribly convincing, in
> and of itself. We've heard that story before.
>

​No, you haven't heard that before. No sitting American president from
​either political party has ever said that one of the 2 people that will
succeed him is simply unfit for office, but Obama did yesterday:

*​"Donald Trump ​is unfit and woefully unprepared to be president​. ​There
have been Republican presidents with whom I disagreed but I didn’t have a
doubt that they could function as president​.​ I think I was right and Mitt
Romney and John McCain were wrong on certain policy issues but I never
thought that they couldn’t do the job. And had they won, I would have been
disappointed but I would have said to all Americans: this is our president
and I know they’re going to abide by certain norms and rules and common
sense, will observe basic decency, will have enough knowledge about
economic policy and foreign policy and our constitutional traditions and
rule of law that our government will work and then we’ll compete four years
from now to try and win an election.​ ​But that’s not the situation
here.​"​ *

​That is unprecedented, that is not politics as usual, that has not been
said in 200 years.

And it's hard to keep up with Trump, just today he said if he loses that
can only mean the election was rigged and the November 8 vote illegal, and
that also is not politics as usual, no presidential candidate has ever said
something like that before.

John K Clark


  ​



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