Why does Trump keep toying with nuclear bombs? I think I know why.
The president has terrified close advisers with the prospect of nuclear escalation. Now, he's spreading his radioactive dreams overseas.
I watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys. He may be closer to playing with them than you think.
Last week, the president told Axios he was “close” to ordering a “massive attack” on Iran and that Israel “would join in two minutes,” if he asked. The threat had the same ominous feel of his April comments that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It was an insinuation that he possessed super powers — and might break the world’s nuclear taboo to end the stalemate. As it turns out, the United States actually paused bombing on Friday night in Iran, after Trump’s top military adviser warned that Patriot interceptor stockpiles were reportedly falling to dangerous levels.
But a “pause” is not the same thing as restraint. In the Axios interview, Trump explained why the war is still going at all: “They haven’t received enough pain yet.” Not enough pain. I’ve heard rhetoric like that from him before. And it wasn’t about Iran.
Back in 2017, Trump judged that the only way to bring North Korea to heel was to make it suffer. He tweeted furiously at “Rocketman” Kim Jong-un and promised “fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before” if the hermit kingdom didn’t meet his demands. That was Trump’s first wink-nod to the fact that he possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs and was ready to use them. Kim answered by threatening to fire missiles at Guam and testing a nuclear-capable missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.
The situation escalated so rapidly that Defense Secretary James Mattis pulled me and other DHS officials aside after a Situation Room meeting and told us flatly to prepare like we were going to war. A nuclear war. So we did. For the first time in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, we ran exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil, because frankly, we couldn’t rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation.
Years later, I put it to CNN as plainly as I could:
I will tell you very honestly, Trump in the first term, at least when I was there, fantasized quite openly to advisers about wanting to blow up bombs. It wasn’t more complicated than that, he didn’t have this 3D chess strategy, he wanted to see bombs blown up. That was alarming to people.
Trump wanted to see something blow up, and the rest of us built contingency plans around that desire. Thankfully, he didn’t launch nukes at North Korea. But General Mattis also isn’t at the Pentagon anymore. “Pistol Pete” Hegseth is.
Trump’s nuclear fantasies go way back. When he was a candidate in 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said a foreign policy adviser had come away from a briefing with Trump rattled, because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: “If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?” Candidate Trump also told The New York Times he wasn’t sure it “would be a bad thing for us” if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea, and he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nukes, too, “absolutely.”
Since then, Trump has toyed with nuclear weapons more openly and more recklessly than any American president ever entrusted with the stewardship of the bomb. The closest runner-up is Richard Nixon, who in 1974 — besieged by Watergate and reportedly drinking heavily — told a group of lawmakers, “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” That remark so rattled Washington that a senator phoned the Pentagon about restraining a “berserk president,” and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger quietly instructed military commanders to double-check any launch order from the White House.
Nixon’s flirtation with armageddon lasted a few dark months at the end of a collapsing presidency. Trump’s has run for a decade, across two terms, in public, with a smile. And he’s not finished yet.
Which brings us back to last week. The administration signed a nuclear energy deal with Saudi Arabia, effectively leaving the door open to letting Riyadh build a nuke someday, or at least the core ingredients for a bomb. As if that’s not troubling enough, the deal omits standard safeguards that give international inspectors expanded access to nuclear sites. What’s more, the actual signed agreement doesn’t include a no-enrichment promise, as Trump claimed on social media, nor the Abraham Accords condition he tried to retroactively attach.
Nonproliferation veterans are alarmed, to say the least. A former official at the International Atomic Energy Agency said, “The U.S. should never have agreed to enrichment without a really strong inspections regime.” Another Gulf expert called Saudi Arabia’s resistance to inspections “the most glaring problem of the agreement,” since it’s exactly the kind of gap a covert weapons program would exploit.
And remember, it was just a few months ago that Trump ordered a resumption of American nuclear weapons testing, potentially in violation of the treaty banning it, prompting Russia to announce it would follow suit. Between Trump’s unchecked brinksmanship, possible nuclear proliferation to new countries, and broken treaties, you have a radioactive cocktail being stirred on the international stage. Add in the unresolved war with Iran, and you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.
The experts who track this for a living agree we’re not overreacting. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest it has ever been in the Clock’s 79-year history — because, in their words, the risk of nuclear use is now “unsustainably and unacceptably high.”
So why does he keep doing this? Why does the president of the United States keep circling back to the most dangerous machinery humans have ever built? I can’t tell you his answer for sure. But based on close study of the man, I can give you my best guess. Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list.
I saw the quest begin. When Trump came into office the first time, he queried aides about the outer limits of his authority. In a series of conversations, he was introduced to the Insurrection Act, the closest thing to martial law in the U.S. system. He was delighted. He took to calling these his “magical authorities.” Literally.
But even those magical authorities come with checks and balances, and Trump chafed at every one of them. So he made his next discovery: if he simply defied the checks, he could be more powerful still. In sheer magnitude, his second administration has broken more laws and violated the Constitution with more apparent frequency than almost any other occupant of the Oval Office. (On immigration alone, federal judges have found that Trump’s team illegally detained individuals on nearly 16,000 separate occasions, and they keep going, seemingly undeterred by the rulings piling up against them.)
Trump isn’t shy about where the quest has taken him. He told Axios the Iran war taught him there are “no limits” to his power. Last month, he reposted a document on Truth Social declaring him the most powerful man who has ever lived, ranking himself above Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and William the Conqueror. The document was attributed to “Presidential Historian Dave King.” Reporters checked. Dave King is not a historian. He’s a longtime caddy for the golfer Gary Player.
To say that he’s “toying” with extreme powers is probably the wrong phraseology. He’s addicted to power. Very much like it’s an intoxicant. When his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic that her boss had an “alcoholic’s personality,” it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue. That’s how everyone who’s served the man has come to see him (if they’re being honest with themselves). He has an uncontrollable, pathological, junkie-like urge to power.
For a man chasing ever-bigger thrills, domestic law-breaking will eventually stop delivering the high. Already, Trump has found a more potent drug in foreign policy. Venezuela. Greenland. Boat strikes. Iran. In his second term, statecraft has become the outlet for these cravings, with the result that the recipient of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize turns out to have quite the predilection for war. Who could’ve guessed?
But if deploying troops to seize foreign leaders and raining missiles on other nations isn’t cutting it anymore, I worry about where the quest leads next. I’ve written before about how close Trump got to using the bomb the first time. Let’s not forget what Trump reportedly absconded with after he left the presidency: U.S. nuclear secrets. Back in office, the fixation has returned with his thinly veiled allusions to the use of civilization-wrecking military force.
Donald Trump is searching for the thrill again. He plainly wants to do something with the bomb, even if it’s just to light one off in a mountain as a test. Our only solace is that — if past is prologue — he’ll be stymied by his own distractions and never get around to it. The man may want to detonate something very big. But it’s more likely to be his own presidency than a nuclear weapon. On that score, I’m happy to help him.
Your friend, in defiance,
Stay tuned tomorrow for more information about the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile, rolling into our nation’s capital on WEDNESDAY, July 29! Press conference at 8am ET that day.
IF YOU’RE A MEMBER, YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THE NEWSLETTER BELOW THE LINE. IF NOT, SIGN UP HERE!
