Trump, Mueller and Kim Jong-un: Three Actors In a Very Dangerous Play

Trump, Mueller and Kim Jong-un: Three Actors In a Very Dangerous Play
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

The clock is beginning to tick faster and louder.

With the recent indictments of Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and George Papadopoulos by special counsel Robert Mueller, it is clear that the Russia investigation’s regular season is over and the playoffs have begun. Judging by the President’s response to this first set of indictments – screaming and yelling at television screens – it is safe to say our President now realizes his bloodhound adversary is smart, clever and relentless.

Anyone paying attention to the ongoing Trump/Russia story knows that the question has never been whether or not Trump colluded with the Russians. It has always been, how can we prove it? To think that it is anything else is to not understand Trump at all. He is constitutionally incapable of not colluding with anybody when it benefits him. The probability that he would take the high road and steer clear when offered an opportunity to conspire with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton, is the same as expecting a UFO to land on the roof of the Planetarium.

Keep in mind that Trump never did want nor did he ever expect to win. Hence, being sloppy was not a concern. Unfortunately for Trump he won, and now the trail of breadcrumbs he left in the election’s wake are being meticulously followed. As the evidence mounts, the edges of terror have begun to creep into Trump’s consciousness. The following scenario comes to mind when imagining how this will play out.

The Mueller investigation continues, and the expected indictments of Michael Flynn and his son become a reality. If the initial indictments set off a 6 on the Richter scale in Trump’s brain, these events move the needle to 8.

Panic and rage now consume every moment of Trump’s experience. He begins manufacturing possible reasons to fire Mueller. The Constitutional crisis that many pundits have warned about arrives. Congress swings into action to prevent this from happening. Trump fails in his attempt and the investigation remains alive. This is followed by a third set of indictments months later that include Don Jr. and Jared Kushner.

If this is how the narrative unfolds, Trump experiences a “No Way Out” moment. Higher cognitive processes begin shutting down as he goes into survival mode knowing his own indictment is an eye blink away.

How will he deal with this existential crisis? Well, we know that he only has two strategies. The first is attack everybody and anybody; the second is to divert attention away from what’s happening.

It would appear that Trump is totally boxed in with no available options. Then, in a moment where irony meets schadenfreude, “Rocket Man” steps out onto the international stage and test launches another ICBM.

Think about it for a moment. The President of North Korea will be monitoring Trump’s crisis. Given the acrimonious relationship between the two leaders, would it be surprising for Kim Jong-un to want to exacerbate Trump’s distress by testing another missile? Let’s assume that the test is successful and reinforces the belief that North Korea’s technology is moving closer to being able to reach the west coast of the United States. Trump is now armed with exactly what he needs; the diversionary event to start a war claiming North Korea is an imminent threat.

The consensus among pundits is that, if a war were to start on the Korean Peninsula, it would probably be triggered by an accident. However, one can make a stronger case that war would be triggered by dysfunctional/purposeful intentions, a characteristic that governs virtually everything Donald Trump does.

The fact that this choice will kill at least a few hundred thousand people in a conventional war, and far more if nuclear weapons are employed, will never factor into Trump’s decision-making process. He’s already on the record in a conversation with Lindsey Graham as stating that a war with North Korea would be taking place on the other side of the world and people would be dying there, not here. In other words, for Trump this would be a video game, not something real.

If Trump is successful at starting a war to save his Presidency – with the likely outcomes being the destruction of North Korea and a massive number of casualties - he will declare victory and paint a picture of himself as the president who saved the world.

So what should we be doing to prevent this catastrophic scenario from playing out? There is only one way to ensure this doesn’t happen and, fortunately, it is already in the works. Tammy Duckworth, a democratic senator from Illinois, and other Senate democrats have introduced legislation that would prevent the president from making a pre-emptive strike against North Korea without congressional approval, barring an imminent threat to the U.S. or its allies.

It’s hard to imagine that any sane individual would vote against this legislation, but then again, sanity and politics don’t always go hand in hand. Let’s hope that Bob Mueller is taking the above scenario into account as he structures his timeline going forward.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot