THE PROBLEM IS what happens in crisis. In the novel, North Korea shoots down a South Korean airliner by mistake and South Korea responds with a very small, almost symbolic, missile strike. It is at this point that Trump, with one spectacularly ill-timed tweet, sets into motion a chain of events that neither he nor any of his staff can control. And it is all done innocently enough.

Trump hasn’t even been fully briefed about the crisis. He is about to descend the narrow set of stairs that lead into the basement at Mar-a-Lago and to the secure conference room. Trump is famously afraid of stairs—one of those things that an author can’t make up—and reaches for his phone as a kind of comfort. His tweet is a throwaway comment, a repetition of a bit of banter he had tried out a few minutes earlier in a phone call with his John Kelly-like chief of staff.

LITTLE ROCKET MAN WON’T BE BOTHERING US MUCH LONGER.

Oh, but how different that tweet looks to Kim Jong Un!