Donald Trump suggested attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons in meetings with his aides, saying the US could blame the attack on another country, according to a new book about his presidency.
Trump made the remarks in 2017, his first year in office, when he was especially fiery in his public comments about North Korea, and warned dictator Kim in August of that year “not to make any threats” to the United States as he did.
The following month, during his first speech at the United Nations, Trump doubled down on the threat by telling the North Korean dictator that he would “totally destroy” his country and mockingly referring to him as “little rocket man”.
White House officials, led by Trump’s chief of staff John Kelly, said they were concerned that the president’s privacy discussions were similarly threatening. The New York Times journalist Michael Schmidt writes in his book that Trump threatened North Korea on social media in the days after Kelly took office.
In a book to be published next week, the New York Times in Washington wrote: “What scared Kelly even more than the tweets was the fact that behind closed doors in the Oval Office, Trump continued to talk about wanting to go to war. He discussed the idea of using nuclear weapons against North Korea, saying that if He will take such an action, the administration can blame someone else and absolve itself of responsibility.”
Schmidt said that “behind closed doors in front of his aides, Trump talked about using force against North Korea, and there were deep concerns about that because Trump has said things in public that signal the potential for military conflict.”
After Trump proposed a ruse to disguise where the attack might come from, Kelly, a former general who many saw as a moderating force on the president during his 19 months in office, noted that “it will be difficult not to point the finger of blame at us,” according to the book. However, the following year, he became the first US president to meet his North Korean counterpart when the two held a summit in the Korean demilitarized zone.