At the height of tensions between the United States and North Korea early in the Trump presidency, Donald Trump reportedly appeared to seriously consider the idea of nuking the Asian nation into oblivion and blaming someone else for the crime, a new book has claimed.
Referencing Trump’s threats on Twitter and at the United Nations in 2017 to unleash “fire and fury” on and “totally destroy” North Korea unless “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un walked back his “threats” against Washington and its allies, NYT journalist Michael Schmidt alleged that Trump appeared serious about these bombastic remarks in private.
“What scared [then-White House Chief of Staff John] Kelly even more than the tweets was the fact that behind closed doors in the Oval Office, Trump continued to talk as if he wanted to go to war. He cavalierly discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, saying that if he took such an action, the administration could blame someone else for it and absolve itself of responsibility,” Schmidt wrote.
“It’d be tough to not have the finger pointed at us,” Kelly reportedly responded to the president’s ponderings. According to Schmidt’s account, Pentagon leaders’ attempts to convey to the president the consequences of a hot war between the US and North Korea appeared to have “no impact on Trump,” with the businessman said to have expressed ‘annoyance’ over the prospect of needing congressional authorization for a pre-emptive attack against the country.
Trump’s White House aides reportedly also expressed concerns that the president “would repeatedly talk on unclassified phones, with friends and confidants outside the government, about how he wanted to use military force against North Korea,” Schmidt wrote. “Kelly would have to remind Trump that he could not share classified information with his friends,” the author added.
Whether or not Trump really considered attacking North Korea during his first months in the White House remains uncertain. Schmidt is an unapologetic proponent of the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory, and claimed in 2020 that Trump secretly underwent a medical procedure which required then-Vice President Mike Pence to prepare to take the reins of power - claims which Trump dismissed as "fake news."
During his presidency and in the two years since he’s been out of office, journalists and former administration officials have released dozens of ‘insider accounts’ into the Trump presidency, accusing the former president of ignorance, a short attention span, having to be talked down from escalatory steps in crises, and general ill-advised policy decisions.
However, Trump, who has broadly rejected these accounts as attempts to make a buck off of his name, expressed great pride in his farewell speech in January 2021 in becoming the first US president in decades not to pull America into a new war. In 2019, after Iran shot down a US spy drone, and in 2020, after it lobbed ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq in retaliation to the Soleimani murder, Trump backed down from launching strikes against the Islamic Republic, despite the advice of his officials, and Israel. Towards the end of his presidency, former officials came out of the woodwork to brag about how they willfully ignored some of Trump’s anti-interventionist inclinations, including by openly lying on troop numbers in Syria, and orders to withdraw from that war-torn country.
13 November 2020, 18:42 GMT
After about a year of back-and-forth threats in 2017, Trump and Chairman Kim managed to find common ground, agreeing to meet several times between 2018 and 2019, and even symbolically walking through the Demilitarized Zone between the Koreas together, with Trump becoming the first American president to ever step foot into North Korea. Trump and Kim also sent one another a series of warm diplomatic letters, continuing to write to each other even after talks on the potential for the denuclearization and demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula petered out.
Trump was teased by hawkish former National Security Advisor John Bolton over the communications, which Trump himself once described as “beautiful” “love letters.” After firing Bolton, Trump called the former aide a “wacko” and a “jerk” for blabbing about the letters in his book “The Room Where It Happened.”