This is a continuation of a series begun in Part 1 and continued in Part 2 in which I am reviewing Trump’s actions since he won the Presidential election and up to the day of his Inauguration.
Four. Trump has declined to receive the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) which is prepared everyday for the President of the United States (POTUS) to read every day. What is the PDB? The PDB, produced and presented by the Director of National Intelligence, unites intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other members of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The Brief is also produced for the President-elect of the United States between Election Day, and the Inauguration.
This document (or something similar) has been delivered to the POTUS since 1961. the PDB has been called the most highly-sensitized document in the U.S. government…
…and Trump has decided to receive these briefings only three days a week.
Five. During the week beginning Sunday, 18-Dec-2016 Russian President Vladimir Putin made the following statement:
“We need to strengthen the military potential of strategic nuclear forces, especially with missile complexes that can reliably penetrate any existing and prospective missile defense systems,”
Then-President-elect Trump responded on Twitter:
“The U.S. must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
Later in the week Trump escalated his earlier statement thus:
“Let it be an arms race … we will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all.”
It may be that if you haven’t had your seven billion billion billion atoms separated from each other by a detonated thermonuclear device or have never been close enough to the aforesaid detonation to survive yet have your flesh melt from off your bones, you may find it easy to flippantly speak of nuclear weapons proliferation and the increased probability of nuclear holocaust that comes with it.
It may be…
…if you are insane; or if you believe that you’d be somewhere safe while billions of your fellow humans writhe in nuclear agony…
…or both.