President Trump and the nuclear bomb codes

A man in uniform will wait discreetly behind the scenes of today’s US Presidential Inauguration. He will carry the briefcase containing the codes with which Donald Trump will be empowered to launch the world’s most potent nuclear arsenal. For the next four years a military aide with the briefcase will stay constantly by Mr Trump’s side.

It’s a scary prospect, and not just because the reality-TV star businessman President has no experience of either politics or the military. Donald Trump has an erratic and volatile personality. He is thin-skinned, quick-tempered and prone to vindictive retaliation to judge from his juvenile use of Twitter. He is a man with poor control of his impulses.

Throughout the campaign commentators predicted that at some point he would drop the coarse vulgar braggadocio, with which he sought to enlist America’s disenfranchised angry white voters, and become “presidential”. He never did, instead issuing wild threats to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, ban Muslims from entering the US, denigrate climate change, cosy up to the Russians, disparage NATO, and slap trade tariffs as high as 35% on goods entering the United States, starting a trade war which could plunge the world into recession.

But the signals from his team are mixed. He has nominated an Energy Secretary who thinks the Department of Energy shouldn’t exist, a Secretary of State with a history of doing commercial deals in Russia, and a Defence Secretary who rejoices in the name of “Mad Dog”. His chief Middle East adviser backs the extremist Israeli desire to abandon a two-state solution and suppress the Palestinian dispossessed.

Appearing before select committees in Congress, however, his nominees have sprung surprises. Mr Trump’s future Secretary of State called Russia “an unfriendly adversary”, adding “we are not likely to ever be friends”. His Defence nominee contradicted the Trump verdict that NATO is “obsolete” and called it “the most successful military alliance in modern world history”. Trump nominees also rejected their leader’s insistence that President Obama’s nuclear arms deal with Iran should be torn up. They said No to the idea that the US should withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. And the man chosen to be the new director of the CIA said he would refuse to carry out a Trump order to torture suspected terrorists.

It is just possible that these men will be able to moderate the worst impulses of the new President. After all Mr Trump lacks consistent views on many things – he has changed his mind about abortion and gay rights, for example – and seems inclined to go for whatever is politically opportune.

In ancient Rome victorious generals as they made their triumphal progress through the city were said to have a slave stand behind them in their chariots to whisper into the great man’s ear that this glory was transient and that one day he too would die. We can only hope that the presence of the man with the briefcase exercises a similar psychological restraint on Donald Trump.

from The Church Times

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