History books are filled with stories of how terrible wars were started. The assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered WWI. Hitler invading Poland and the bombing of Pearl Harbor are two tragic catalysts for WWII. It’s hard to imagine how future historians will one day frame a looming conflict with North Korea and the United States: “You see, there was this thing called Twitter.”
We’ve all known that @realDonaldTrump’s Twitter feed is inaccurate, poorly spelled, dopey, reckless, and dangerous in its whimsical abuse of presidential power that might one day lead to impeachment. But now, we’re realizing just how immediately dangerous his 140-character claptrap actually is.
A nation that’s been building costly nuclear arsenals in the same way that Trump has built his chain of overpriced hotels has accused the president of building tension with his “aggressive” tweets that are “making trouble.” Vice Minister Han Song Ryol told the Associated Press in an exclusive interview on April 14 that “We will go to war” should the United States provoke militarily. “We’ve got a powerful nuclear deterrent already in our hands, and we certainly will not keep our arms crossed in the face of a U.S. pre-emptive strike.”
This would probably be a good time for a few key people to sit down at the negotiating table. And it seems China is attempting to orchestrate just that. Mike Pence just flew to South Korea to see how he might use his rapidly developing foreign policy skills to alleviate the tension. Problem is, Trump has sent so many aggressive tweets, it’s hard to pin down which ones the North Korean government might find so nuclear-deterrent worthy. He’s tweeted any number of times about North Korea.
But it appears North Korea did cite two specific tweets Trump blarped out:
To make matters worse, Sean Spicer sassily let North Korea know it was “on notice.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also claimed the administration has “spoken enough about North Korea.”
It’s absurd for a country that has been testing mass weaponry as a potential threat to the United States for years to source Trump’s “aggressive” social media practices. Especially when they could just as easily point to the fact that Trump approved what he called an “armada” of aircraft carriers to Korean waters with Jaws-like menace.
But the Twitter feed it is. Which means at this particularly precarious, terrifying moment in American history, the only response now is to quote the words of the very wise, almost-Commander in Chief Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump not long ago: