Nuclear-War Threat
By John Cassidy
10:26 A.M.
Can anybody persuade Donald Trump to go back to work? Having him on vacation is too stressful. When he is in the White House, we’ve come to expect that bizarre and disturbing developments can occur at any moment. But the phrase “Presidential vacation” conjures up images of Ronald Reagan chopping wood in Santa Barbara, George H. W. Bush fishing off the coast of Maine, Bill Clinton golfing in Jackson Hole, and Barack Obama biking on Martha’s Vineyard. At this time of year, White House correspondents are usually puttering about some exclusive resort, filing color stories, and almost everybody else is tuning out Presidential politics for a couple of weeks. Trump vacations aren’t like that.
On Monday, the President took time away from the lush fairways and greens at Trump National Golf Club, in Bedminster, New Jersey, to tweet insults at Senator Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, who had the temerity to suggest that Robert Mueller, the special counsel, should be allowed to continue and complete his investigation. On Tuesday afternoon, Trump again interrupted his break, this time to attend a briefing in the Bedminster clubhouse about the nation’s opioid crisis. He took the opportunity to threaten a devastating nuclear strike on North Korea ...
Within minutes, news of Trump’s words had gone around the world. They were met with a mixture of astonishment, alarm, and gallows humor. “Look on the bright side: compared to the coming thermonuclear inferno, global warming will seem quite pleasant,” Paul Begala, the Democratic strategist, said on Twitter. In a similar vein, Ross Douthat, the Times columnist, tweeted, “Nuclear war Twitter will be the best Twitter.” Psychologists tell us that laughing is often a way to deal with stress and to downplay dangerous situations. Indeed, the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran has theorized that laughter developed as a way for early humans to signal to their kin, “Don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm.” Hopefully, Trump’s use of this bellicose rhetoric was such an instance, but it’s hard to be sure ...
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