Donald Trump once said he wants and “deserves” to win the Nobel Peace Prize. However, a new book has revealed that it’s the Trump advisers who are probably a lot more deserving of the honor — for saving America from Donald Trump!
Politics
According to the book, “The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World,” by CNN journalist Jim Sciutto, Trump advisers regularly and purposely hesitated to give their boss military options during escalating tensions with both North Korea and Iran. The fear within the West Wing was that Trump was so erratic and unpredictable, he could unexpectedly take the US to war. In fact, Trump advisers even went so far as to inform their counterparts in both countries that they regularly did not know what their boss would do next.
During the time when Donald Trump labeled Kim Jong Un “little rocket man” and the North Korean dictator reacted by calling Trump a “dotard,” there was a very real fear amongst senior members of the administration that the war of words could culminate with Trump launching military action against Pyongyang.
“We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable,” said Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump’s special representative for North Korea policy until 2018. “And I would communicate that [to our Korean counterparts].”
Yun recalled a time during the 2017 standoff with North Korea (which led to a 2018 false missile alert for residents of Hawaii). According to Yun, the Pentagon hesitated to give Trump a broad range of military options out of concern that he would actually order a major military strike against North Korea.
“You had to be careful what options you gave him,” Yun said. “We were being very cautious, because any options you put out there, he could use them.”
The strategic withholding of military options by US military brass frustrated the White House. “The White House viewed it as ‘Goddamnit! The President is looking for all options!'” Yun recalled. But under the direction of Defense Secretary James Mattis, the Pentagon did not budge.
In 2019 while Donald Trump and his team considered military options against Iran for escalating attacks in the Persian Gulf, senior Pentagon officials made it clear to US partners in the region as well as Tehran that they could not predict how and where Trump would respond — or if he would respond at all.
“We told allies that we did not know what the President would be willing to do against Iran,” said Mick Mulroy, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East until 2019. “It was possible he could make a decision that would lead to an escalation of the conflict, and that escalation could lead to war. So, they needed to relay that to Iran so they realized not even his staff knew what would happen if they attacked another oil facility, for instance.”
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“He has the attention span of a fruit fly.” – John Bolton, former National Security Adviser
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Trump’s erratic behavior behind the scenes as well as the measures officials enacted to protect America from Trump was further documented by others.
“Donald Trump made it hard for me to protect America,” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention in the Trump administration. “My job was to keep Americans safe and Trump was my biggest obstacle. He ignored white nationalist violence, ignored COVID-19, and nearly started a war. How could I vote for him again? How could anyone?”
In excerpts from the Bob Woodward book “Rage,” other administration officials referred to Donald Trump as “Dangerous.” “Unfit.” “No moral compass.” “Doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Although we have since learned that former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former White House chief of staff Gen. Jim Kelly were frequently at odds with Donald Trump, we can thank those Trump advisers and perhaps a dozen others for saving America from Trump and from preventing an unknown number of chaotic missteps from the man in the Oval Office.
That picture of Kim Jong Un looking at Trump reminds me of the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Kim is saying to himself “What the Hell has Americans done to themselves?!” “This Fake-azz alpha is 10x crazier than I am. And he’s an absolute retard.”
“THIS is who they voted for to be president?!”