I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017
I'm sorry but if you have stopped negotiating with North Korea then what is left besides a military response?...Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 1, 2017
People are counting on General Mattis to be the stop gap that keeps Trump from impulsively attacking North Korea, but a recent Newsweek article suggests that Mattis may not actually have the power to do that.
Courtesy of Newsweek:
"POTUS doesn't need to call the SecDef at all to do this,” says Stephen Schwartz, editor and co-author of Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940. “Although he’d presumably be included on the conference call if this weren't a middle-of-the-night, spur-of-the-moment thing.” And as nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein discovered in a 2015 U.S. Air Force document last spring, the president can bypass the secretary of defense altogether and “direct the use of nuclear weapons through…the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the combatant commanders and, ultimately, to the forces in the field exercising direct control of the weapons."
I am a lover of horror movies, and have watched literally hundreds, but NOTHING has frightened me as much as having this man in the White House.
I used to stay up night's worrying about what Bush and Cheney, might unleash on the world, but at least they appeared to be sane.
There is no telling where this lunatic might take us.
