Trump calls for more nuclear weapons, aides say he didn’t mean it, he says he did

Posted by | December 23, 2016 12:50 | Filed under: News Behaving Badly Politics

Trying to understand what Donald Trump actually stands for is not an easy task.

Trump ignited his latest firestorm on Thursday, when he tweeted that: “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

The striking-yet-ambiguous comment was immediately interpreted as a sign that the Trump administration was willing to abandon decades of work by presidents of both parties — beginning with Ronald Reagan — to reduce America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons to lower the risk of a catastrophic conflict.

Trump’s aides immediately tried to offer a different — and, if true, far more reasonable — explanation. The president-elect, they said, wasn’t calling for the US to build more nuclear weapons; he was calling for renewed efforts to take better care of the ones the Pentagon already has. Trump spokesman Jason Miller said the tweet was meant to emphasize the need to “improve and modernize our deterrent capabilities.”

But didn’t take long for Trump to contradict his own aides. On Friday morning, Morning Joe host Mika Brzezinski said that the president-elect had actually meant what he first appeared to have meant. “Let it be an arms race,” she quoted him as saying to her and fellow host Joe Scarborough. “We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

Trump regularly takes two positions on the same issue, often falsely insisting he didn’t say something that he had publicly said or tweeted. That’s worrisome enough when it comes to denying that he’d called climate change a Chinese hoax when he’d literally said that exact thing. But it’s downright terrifying when it comes to nuclear weapons, which have the literal capacity to end human life.

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Copyright 2016 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

6 responses to Trump calls for more nuclear weapons, aides say he didn’t mean it, he says he did

  1. Jungle_Bhoy December 23rd, 2016 at 12:58

    So Trump aims to do to the US what the US did to the Soviet Union – bring it down with a crippling arms race it can ill-afford! I guess Putin is exacting his revenge through his peach-coloured puppet

  2. labman57 December 23rd, 2016 at 13:28

    The pundits in Trump’s inner circle are demonstrating one of their primary functions during the next 4 years — Interpreters of Trump-Speak:
    “What Donald Trump MEANT to say is ….”
    (And what typically follows is clarification through obfuscation.)

    Trump is extremely thin-skinned and he lacks the requisite impulse control to serve as POTUS. We shouldn’t trust him with a Twitter account, let alone our nation’s nuclear arsenal.
    Bottom line: America is screwed.

  3. Willys41 December 23rd, 2016 at 16:09

    Nobody knows what Trump meant to say because he doesn’t know what he meant to say because he doesn’t know what the heck he’s talking about, now or ever, no matter the subject.

  4. amersham1046 December 23rd, 2016 at 16:27

    Going to be a worrisome 4 years

  5. oldfart December 24th, 2016 at 09:17

    What he has said versus what he and his swamp things will do remains to be seen.
    What he IS however will never change.
    On Jan 20th, simply take a snapshot of our countries entire condition.
    By 2020 we’ll all know if he has made America great again or not.
    Judging from what he has backtracked on so far,
    It probably won’t even take that long.

  6. labman57 December 24th, 2016 at 12:11

    If Trump tweeted that the moon was made of cheese, his fawning sycophant support base would collectively respond: “I knew it! Moon rocks my ass! Those so-called scientists are all frauds.”

    And Donnie’s handlers would go into full damage-control mode, spinning that Trump actually was suggesting that NASA is a cheesy organization for embracing research on human-influenced climate change.

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