Trump at the Helm — God Help Us

President Donald Trump’s daily pronouncements typically are greeted by most Americans with a mixture of derision, sarcasm, and humor. Whether he is tweeting about something that he asserts is “sad” or speaking nonsensically at a Boy Scout jamboree, for the most part we accept most of what he says with a combination of resignation and disbelief. We just shake our heads and think to ourselves, “There he goes again.”

However, when talking about North Korea this week, Trump’s statement threatening North Korea ‘‘with fire and fury like the world has never seen’’ is nothing to joke about.

Most of us had assumed that Trump could not start a war (nuclear of conventional) without some sort of approval from either Congress or his National Security Council or the Joints Chiefs of Staff or someone with an ounce of rationality that could tell him, “No.”

However, according to an article in the Boston Globe, quoting an expert in the realm of presidential power, Trump has almost “unchecked authority to order the use of conventional or nuclear weapons against North Korea.”

Regardless of where one stands on the political spectrum, that is an incredibly scary prospect. Does anyone doubt that Donald Trump would start a war, including a nuclear one, if for no other reason than to distract attention from the many investigations surrounding him and his family?

Pronouncements such as the one Trump made this week make everything else — the health care debate, tax cuts, Russian election-hacking, etc. — pale in comparison. If Donald Trump is even remotely thinking of making some kind of attack on North Korea, no one on earth will be safe from the fallout — and we mean that both literally and figuratively.