Closer than we knew
Vanity Fair looks at the 13,000 addendum to the new paperback release of NY Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President featuring a long profile of former Chief of Staff John Kelly:
Last March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Donald Trump reportedly told a room full of Republican National Committee donors that the US should “put the Chinese flag” on a bunch of military planes and “bomb the shit” out of Russia—and afterward, “we say, China did it, we didn’t do it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch.” Maybe you remember this, because it was a fucking insane thing to say. Or maybe you don’t, because Trump has said and done fucking insane things on a near-daily basis for many years now. Either way, it seems that this was not a one-off, and that suggesting the US attack another country and blame it on someone else is reportedly very much the 2024 presidential candidate’s thing.
In a new section of his 2020 book on Trump, as obtained by NBC News, New York Times correspondent Michael Schmidt reveals that Trump spent much of 2017 suggesting “behind closed doors in the Oval office” that he wanted to attack North Korea. The then president, Schmidt writes in the soon-to-be released afterword to Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President, “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 to absolve itself of responsibility.”
For his part, John Kelly reportedly attempted to explain to his boss why that probably wouldn’t work, noting that “It’d be tough to not have the finger pointed at us,” but, of course, the then White House chief of staff was using reason and logic, two things that haven’t typically worked on Trump. Still, according to Schmidt, Kelly tried, bringing in “the military’s top leaders to the White House to brief Trump about how war between the US and North Korea could easily break out, as well as the enormous consequences of such a conflict. But the argument about how many people could be killed had ‘no impact on Trump.’” Nor did the threat of economic blowback; according to the book’s update, informed of why all of this would be a very bad idea, the president would still “turn back to the possibility of war, including at one point raising to Kelly the possibility of launching a preemptive military attack against North Korea.”
Last May, less than two months after the former guy reportedly floated the idea of attacking Russia and blaming it on China, we learned that, according to former defense secretary Mark Esper, Trump asked, on at least two occasions, if the military could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” saying, “They don’t have control of their own country.” Told all the various reasons this idea was a no-go, the then president reportedly insisted that they could do it “quietly,” adding: “no one would know it was us.” Informed that, yes, people would know it was the US, Trump apparently responded that he would simply lie and say the US didn’t do it.
Trump released a video last week announcing that he would order the military to take out the cartels if he wins the white house again. So he’s still on it.
I saw Schmidt on MSNBC and he says that when Trump was threatening fire and fury on Kim Jong Un, Kelly managed to get him off of it by suggesting that he make friends with the dictator — something that no one else in history had ever done. It didn’t solve the problem of North Korea’s nuclear program but it did keep Trump from launching nuclear war. As we know, he loved his “friendship” with Kim.
And this: