How Bad Do Things Have to Get For Trump Before He Just Starts a War?

Look, by any reasonable measure, the Trump presidency has been a comical failure in its first two months. Even when you get beyond the fact that his top advisors and media liaisons make public fools of themselves on a daily basis, and Trump himself has been called out on a number of ridiculous lies, the “actual politics” portion of his time in office has only yielded deeper embarrassment. Two versions of his racist travel ban have been slapped down by federal judges, his cabinet nominees come infested with controversy (and some have had to step down), the health care plan he and Paul Ryan dreamed up is despised on both the left and right, and his entire administration has been stuck in the mud of its own Russia entanglements, which seem to get more incriminating by the day. (Translation: He’s getting owned by the intelligence deep state.) Meanwhile, he’s inspired a protest movement from the left unlike anything America has seen in decades, and his approval ratings are consistently poor. Other than some dubious claims about positive employment numbers—for which he bears no responsibility—there’s really nothing he can point to as a positive achievement of his administration.

We know Trump is thin-skinned as hell, and we know it hurt when a united Congress condemned his false “Obama wiretapped me!” remarks, and we know that the worse things become, the more likely he is to either lash out or create a massive distraction. Hell, he might even have released his own tax records this week for that exact purpose.

Where does this leave us?

Well, to judge by two recent remarks by Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the executive branch may be eyeing the ultimate distraction—war. While visiting South Korea, Tillerson put it pretty bluntly, stating outright that “all options are on the table” when it comes to North Korea. Via Politico:

Tillerson, making his first trip to South Korea since taking over as America’s top diplomat, visited the demilitarized zone along the border with North Korea on Friday, according to the Associated Press. He said preemptive military action against North Korea, which recently conducted a ballistic missile test, could be necessary if the repressive regime’s weapons program rises to a level “that we believe requires action.”

It wasn’t long before Trump followed up on his favorite medium, doubling down on the verbal aggression toward North Korea:

North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been “playing” the United States for years. China has done little to help!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 17, 2017

It’s always hard to know where the bluster ends and the coordinated PR push begins, but it’s hard not to be cynical when dealing with this administration, and there’s no better distraction than war. North Korea is a nightmare scenario, too—they have their own impulsive nutjob leader who seems like exactly the kind of person to launch a nuke at San Francisco on a whim, and any action against the otherwise irrelevant communist nation could end up involving China. Again, these may not be the drumbeats of war quite yet, but the fact that we’re hearing any noise at all is deeply worrying.