I believe Trump will set off a nuke before leaving office. I saw the warning signs

There is a red button on [Donald Trump’s desk](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/bbcs-man-washington-untouchable-until-trump-4042876?ico=in-line_link) in the Oval Office. When visitors are in the room, the President sometimes pauses mid-sentence, reaches over with deliberate ceremony, and presses it. The effect on first-timers is instantaneous, especially if Trump is mad about something. One or two faces might flash a look of alarm. Oh no, what did he decide to do? Then a butler appears at the door, bearing a [Diet Coke](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/biden-and-trumps-health-issues-and-tweakments-explained-3137432?ico=in-line_link) on a silver tray. Trump grins. He’s always enjoyed that particular prop – the big red button – which he even has installed on an elevated wooden platform.

That sort of symbolism might be funny to some. Until it isn’t.

This week, a former CIA analyst claimed that during a tense Situation Room confrontation over [Iran](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/uk-france-plan-fix-iran-crisis-trump-4356868?ico=in-line_link), Trump [demanded access to the nuclear codes](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/nuclear-codes-claims-fuel-calls-curbs-trumps-power-4372249?ico=in-line_link) and had to be physically confronted by his most senior military adviser before backing down. The story has not yet been independently confirmed, and the White House has denied it. But anyone who spent time inside the first Trump administration will tell you that the account, whether or not it is literally true, is psychologically credible.

Trump’s fascination with nuclear weapons is very real. When he wields the threat of dropping a nuke or wiping out an entire civilisation, he’s not deploying a negotiating tactic under the cloak of bravado. He’s doing something far more unsettling. He’s being himself.

Before he even took office for the first time, Trump was peppering his advisers with questions about why the United States didn’t more regularly use [nuclear weapons](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/britain-doesnt-need-new-nuclear-deterrent-needs-better-one-4303545?ico=in-line_link). During his presidential transition, he demanded that more be done to “expand [US] nuclear capability”. When a journalist confronted him with concerns that this could spark an arms race, he had this to say: “Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”

As I have written before in these pages, Trump’s first term brought the United States closer to a nuclear exchange than the world ever realised. At one point, his defence chief warned my team to prepare the home front for attack, as if war was imminent. Trump had told advisers he genuinely wanted to [strike North Korea with a nuke](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trump-burning-house-down-watched-him-plan-this-4342196?ico=in-line_link), so at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), we held emergency sessions on strike scenarios against the US homeland, sessions we had never needed to conduct in the department’s history.

How disinterested was Trump in the nuclear threat his own behaviour had created? On the day [North Korea](https://inews.co.uk/topic/north-korea?ico=in-line_link) test-launched a nuclear-capable missile in November 2017 — one that ripped through the skies before breaking apart and crashing into the ocean off the coast of Japan — I raced back to DHS headquarters to find our acting secretary underground in a secure facility, shaken. She wasn’t rattled by the missile specifically. She was rattled by the President’s apparent lack of concern.

Trump had called while the launch was still being assessed. But his subject was not the ICBM. It was the border. He wanted to know why DHS hadn’t deported more people. A nuclear-armed regime had just tested a weapon capable of reaching the American homeland (because of his escalatory tweets), and the President of the United States didn’t seem to care. He wanted to chat about deportations.

Thankfully, the President’s closest advisers found an “off ramp” for the North Korea debacle, and Trump began famously writing “love letters” to [Kim Jong Un](https://inews.co.uk/topic/kim-jong-un?ico=in-line_link) instead of dropping bombs. It was humiliating to see the leader of the free world grovel to one of the most brutal despots on earth. But it was a lot better than nuclear apocalypse.

Which is what makes the present moment so much more dangerous than the first. Trump hasn’t mellowed, and his team has only grown more accommodating toward his bluster. Indeed, he’s not absorbed the institutional dread that every prior nuclear-age president, of whatever party, eventually internalised: namely, the understanding that these weapons exist to deter, not to use. Their very possession demands restraint. For Trump, the bomb remains something else. He sees it as impressive, enticing and symbolic of a superpower he can wield over others.

Unfortunately, the theatre of confrontation is no longer a bilateral stand-off with a hermit kingdom. Trump has drawn the United States into a crisis involving, at minimum, two nuclear-armed states: America itself, [Israel](https://inews.co.uk/topic/israel?ico=in-line_link) – which is widely understood to possess several dozen warheads — and Iran, a country that American and international intelligence assessments suggest holds enough fissile material to assemble as many as a dozen devices within a matter of weeks. Add to that the accelerating involvement of nuclear-armed [Russia](https://inews.co.uk/topic/russia?ico=in-line_link) and [China](https://inews.co.uk/topic/china?ico=in-line_link), and the geometry of escalation becomes terrifying.

But Trump’s nuclear flirtation does not have to culminate in a launch order to be catastrophic. It may already be doing damage of a different kind.

In his first term, the President badly wanted to resume nuclear testing but was talked out of it. No longer. Late last year, [Trump ordered the United States military to resume nuclear weapons tests](https://inews.co.uk/news/world/trump-orders-us-nuclear-weapons-tests-to-begin-the-key-things-to-know-4010747?ico=in-line_link) for the first time since the Cold War ended. The last American test detonation took place in 1992. The international norm against testing has been one of the quiet foundations of non-proliferation for more than three decades.

In the US national security community, many of us are now warning that American tests will give other nations the political cover and strategic incentive to resume their own programmes. Russia. China. Pakistan. India. North Korea. The architecture of restraint that has kept the world’s nuclear arsenals largely static since the end of the Cold War isn’t self-sustaining. It requires, above all, that the most powerful nation on earth treat it as worth preserving. Trump, on the other hand, treats it as worth disrupting.

To put it another way, Trump is the first American President since the start of the nuclear age without the disposition to keep such bombs from going off. Rather, he appears to have the opposite — a perverse and not-so-secret desire to make one go “boom”. And I very much believe that he’ll make that happen before he leaves office, even if it’s only a test.

A president who stumbles by accident into high-stakes nuclear brinksmanship is terrifying, to be sure, but he’s containable — by advisers, procedure and the chain of command. A president who deliberately dismantles the international norms that prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is doing something almost worse. In testing nukes, Trump would be challenging the rest of the world to do the same and making clear that possession of them is a nation’s only true insurance policy against destruction. He’s encouraging proliferation. He’s making future catastrophes more likely, more numerous and harder to prevent long after he has left office.

There’s a version of this story that ends with the Diet Coke arriving and everyone smiling. The button is pressed, the butler appears and the guests laugh with relief. But the joke depends on the red button being fake. What ought to concentrate minds — in Washington, in London, in every capital where serious people are watching this presidency — is that the other button is real, the man pressing it is not constrained by his advisers and the cloud that follows a real detonation will haunt the world forever.

Some jokes are only funny once.

*Miles Taylor is a former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security and has served on Capitol Hill, in the White House and at the Pentagon. He is a No 1 New York Times bestselling author, regular national security commentator and democracy reform leader*.

He is building a bunker with a hospital….

Absolutely not. People who say stuff like this are completely discounting a central facet of Trump’s psyche.

He’s a lazy feckless coward. He’s terrified of consequences, and he’ll do anything he can to avoid being held responsible for his actions.

Trump doesn’t do sustained conflict. He doesn’t fight. His entire strategy on everything is to rush in, smash the place up, and then run away and claim he avoided creating a conflict and ask for praise.

Trump doesn’t have the balls for decisive action, and something as large as using a nuclear weapon is as final as it gets. You can’t just throw off the consequences of that, and that means he would bluff and then back down.

TACO is much more clever than it sounds.

It is a behavior that can be expected from narcissists to take others along with themselves.

But why didn’t these facts come out before the 2024 election? Why didn’t the people who worked in the first administration speak out honestly about how hard they had to work to restrain him? I know all of them refused to work in the second administration but why did they all wait until now to speak up?

Trump has always been obsessed with power and nuclear weapons are the pinnacle of that power. All he needs is an excuse.

Please stop this shit.

Anyone with common sense saw the warning signs 11 years ago.

Always reminded me of the Dead Zone movie. Don’t push that button or I’ll stab you in the face with a soldering iron. Maybe I switched up my Walkens.

The overarching theme of Trump’s presidency seems to be to isolate the United States and make it an international pariah that is despised by all and trusted by none; and he’s making good progress on that. Pressing the nuclear button would fit right into this.

Hope someone tells him about the trigger of doomsday machine.

In an interview with Mary Trump, she said as much. Malignant Narcissists don’t take failure gracefully. As Trump’s health fails and his reign collapses in abysmal failure, he has nothing to left lose. It’s the ultimate temper tantrum a 5 year old going on 79.

I’m starting to think the show Years and Years was a warning.

There was only one President that had the opportunity to fire the nukes.

Truman.

Trump is better than Truman, or anybody else in that manner (in his own eyes). Why he shouldn’t be remembered that the most awesome president?

“after all, why not, why shouldn’t i keep it?”

We know he was talking about it and military leadership keeps getting fired so i can see it.

Trump is like Jafar in Aladdin, when he first gets turned in to a genie.

Infinite power!

(no, itty bitty living space …)

I’m positive as well. Just so he can say that he’ll be remembered (for whatever time we have left) as one of the only presidents to order a nuclear strike.

And we’re all going to watch him do it with no resistance

Was one of the warning signs when he said he was thinking of setting off a nuke?

I’ve been saying the exact same thing. Whether it’s because he feels cornered or just bored, I believe he will at least try to launch a nuke before leaving office.

Plot twist…he’ll allow the US to get nuked.

Because this would be extreme, and Trump is an extremist.

This is fucking scary.