Fear: Trump in the White House(99)
The #TimesUp and #MeToo movements of women and feminists would create an alternative to end the male-dominated patriarchy, Bannon believed.
“Trump is the perfect foil,” he summarized. “He’s the bad father, the terrible first husband, the boyfriend that fucked you over and wasted all those years, and [you] gave up your youth for, and then dumped you. And the terrible boss that grabbed you by the pussy all the time and demeaned you.”
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President Trump’s tweets may have come close to starting a war with North Korea in early 2018. The public never learned the full story of the risks that Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took as they engaged in a public battle of words.
It began on New Year’s Day in an address by Kim, reminding the world, and the American president, of his nuclear weapons.
“It’s not a mere threat but a reality that I have a nuclear button on the desk in my office,” Kim declared. “All of the mainland United States is within the range of our nuclear strike.” It was an ugly and provocative threat.
Lingering after receiving his President’s Daily Brief on January 2, President Trump said, “In this job I’m playing five hands of poker simultaneously, and right now we’re winning most of the hands. Iran is busting up and the regime is under intense pressure. Pakistan is terrified of losing all of our security aid and reimbursements. And South Korea is going to capitulate to us on trade and talks with North Korea.” He seemed on top of the world but he didn’t mention the fifth poker hand.
Real power is fear.
The answer on North Korea was to scare Kim Jung Un. “He’s a bully,” Trump told Porter. “He’s a tough guy. The way to deal with those people is by being tough. And I’m going to intimidate him and I’m going to outfox him.”
That evening, Trump sent a taunting, mine-is-bigger-than-yours tweet that shook the White House and the diplomatic community: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,” Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:49 p.m. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
It played on Kim’s insecurities. In the last six years, 18 of Kim’s 86 missile tests had failed, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The president of the United States was practicing a scene out of Dr. Strangelove. The Internet lost its collective mind.
The Washington Post’s Twitter account rushed to clarify: “There is no button.”
Colin Kahl, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense, tweeted, “Folks aren’t freaking out about a literal button. They are freaking out about the mental instability of a man who can kill millions without permission from anybody.”
Many on Twitter wondered if Trump had violated the platform’s terms of service by threatening nuclear war. Others recalled Hillary Clinton’s line from her July 2016 convention speech: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s tweet was not without supporters. A writer for the conservative Washington Examiner concluded: “One of former President Barack Obama’s central challenges was the foreign perception—by friends and foes alike—that he was reluctant to employ the full range of U.S. power. . . . I believe Trump is right to roll the dice and take the opposite approach.”
Trump was not done. Nor was he satisfied that it sufficed for the United States, the top nuclear power in the world, to issue an unprecedented threat.
Within the White House but not publicly, Trump proposed sending a tweet declaring that he was ordering all U.S. military dependents—thousands of the family members of 28,500 troops—out of South Korea.
The act of removing the dependents would almost certainly be read in North Korea as a signal that the United States was seriously preparing for war.
On December 4, McMaster had received a warning at the White House. Ri Su-yong, the vice chairman of the Politburo, had told intermediaries “that the North would take the evacuation of U.S. civilians as a sign of imminent attack.”
Withdrawing dependents was one of the last cards to play. The possible tweets scared the daylights out of the Pentagon leadership—Mattis and Dunford. A declaration of intent to do so from the U.S. commander in chief on Twitter was almost unthinkable.
A tweet about ordering all military dependents out of South Korea could provoke Kim. The leader of a country like North Korea that only recently had acquired nuclear weapons and had many fewer nukes than a potential adversary could be trigger-happy. A use-it-or-lose-it mind-set could take hold.
The tweet did not go out. But Trump wouldn’t drop the matter, and raised the issue of withdrawing U.S. military dependents with Senator Graham.
On December 3, before Trump and Kim’s war of words, and after a North Korean ICBM test, Graham had advocated removing military families from South Korea. “It’s crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation. He suggested making South Korea an unaccompanied tour for service members and said, “I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.”
Now, a month later, when Trump called, Graham seemed to have had a change of heart.
“You need to think long and hard before you make that decision,” Graham said. “Because when you make that decision, it is hard to go back. The day you do that is the day you rock the South Korean stock market and the Japanese economy. That is a big frigging deal.”