A contender for the presidency has just suggested that the American electorate should not be able to tell what he will do with the power he is asking us to entrust to him.
According to many of Trump’s supporters, this sort of talk is what we are supposed to like about him: He might do anything, and will very probably heedlessly smash things up in a city that desperately needs some smashing. “Aggressive,” “unpredictable” and “poor impulse control” are terrific qualities for the star of a reality show, but they are troubling qualities in the person at the head of your nuclear chain of command.
I recently asked a foreign policy expert what sort of mechanisms there are to stop a future president from launching nuclear weapons unwisely. He gave me a weak smile and said: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but the system is optimized to allow the president to launch without much interference.”
That argument in the Claremont Review, that dwelled on progressive decadence, may make some sense if you think primarily about domestic policy. As American elections normally do — precisely because normal American elections feature two candidates who are both pretty predictable about how they’d handle America’s nuclear arsenal. But when one of the candidates shows signs of untrustworthy with nuclear weapons, we have to think about that above anything else.
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