Donald Trump's casual approach to nuclear genocide

This should be a big deal.

Back in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for president the first time, I wrote that he shouldn’t be given the presidency because he was too cavalier about the use nuclear weapons.

His instincts are not just dangerous but perhaps catastrophic: Joe Scarborough reported this week that Trump had asked a foreign policy expert why America doesn't use its nuclear weapons to solve international problems."And three times (Trump) asked about the use of nuclear weapons," Scarborough said. "Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them."

There's a reason the United States doesn't use nukes so cavalierly: They are genocidally lethal. Using them would make other nuclear powers nervous and angry, increasing the likelihood of a war that could destroy this country -- and a good portion of the world. Donald Trump should understand this. It is frightening that he doesn't.

I’m a bit late to this, but something out of Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile of outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley confirmed those fears:

Early in Trump’s term, when Milley was serving as chief of staff of the Army, Trump entered a cycle of rhetorical warfare with the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. At certain points, Trump raised the possibility of attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons, according to the New York Times reporter Michael S. Schmidt’s book, Donald Trump v. The United States. Kelly, Dunford, and others tried to convince Trump that his rhetoric—publicly mocking Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” for instance—could trigger nuclear war. “If you keep pushing this clown, he could do something with nuclear weapons,” Kelly told him, explaining that Kim, though a dictator, could be pressured by his own military elites to attack American interests in response to Trump’s provocations. When that argument failed to work, Kelly spelled out for the president that a nuclear exchange could cost the lives of millions of Koreans and Japanese, as well as those of Americans throughout the Pacific. Guam, Kelly told him, falls within range of North Korean missiles. “Guam isn’t America,” Trump responded.

This should be a big deal. A huge deal.

There are any number of Trump disqualifiers that don’t seem to be disqualifiers. The other day he suggested that Milley should be executed. After that, he suggested NBC should be investigated for treason. Trump wants so badly to reacquire government power and use it to inflict terrible punishment on his enemies. (I’m not kidding when I say that Barack Obama and Joe Biden might be forced to go into exile if Trump wins the next election.)

But the very worst of all his qualities is a clear itch to use nuclear weapons.

I don’t know if we’ve become so numb to Trump’s provocations, or if we don’t take his seriously threat to use nuclear weapons, but it seems like such casual disregard for millions of lives is not the kind of quality you want in a man who would have the power to end millions of lives.

It’s evil.

Trump had people to argue him out of genocide the first time he held office. It’s not at all clear he’ll have even those meager restraints should he regain the Oval Office. This might be the most important thing to know about him. This might be the most important thing to know for the sake of the future of humanity.

It’s not clear, though, that anybody is paying attention.