There is a boy-who-cried-wolf danger. Trump’s tweet threatening North Korea with “fire and fury” is the most obvious example of Trump ramping up the fear, only to have it dissipate. This trains us not to take the president’s alarming words seriously, lest we look like suckers.
Indeed, in the wake of Trump’s tweet about Iran, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro mocked people who bought into the whole “’Trump will explode the world’ thing,” reminding us that it “led to pretty much nothing.” Well, two years left!
What happens when we have a legitimate threat to our country, and Trump can’t rally folks behind him because he’s pushed bogus threats so many times? What if he wants to prove that he should be taken seriously and actually launches some sort of preemptive strike?
