Annie Jacobsen: evaluation

Transcript context

…You don’t think there’s a deep humanity there? Because his intuition is about everything we know so far, but this situation has never happened in the history of earth. You’re raising a really tricky, interesting conundrum here. Because during COVID, when President Trump and the leader of North Korea were kind of locked in various relationships with one another, good, bad, threatening, non-threatening, friendly; just bananas, you might say, not presidential behavior. If you were someone watching C-span like I do, nerding out on what STRATCOM was actually saying about all this, you noticed that STRATCOM commanders were speaking out publicly to Congress more so than ever I had ever seen before. And this issue came up, would you defy presidential orders? So the caveat I would say to McDuff’s answer of easier to win the Powerball is that if the commander of STRATCOM interpreted the president’s behavior to be unreliable, to be non-presidential, then dot dot dot. But now you’re into some really radical territory. I mean, fundamentally, it feels like just looking at all the presidents of the United States in my lifetime, it feels like none of them are qualified for this six minutes. I could see as being the commander of STRATCOM being like, “This guy?” Basically respecting no president. I know you’re supposed to, commander in chief, but in this situation… I mean everybody, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. If I was a commander of STRATCOM, I’d be like, “What does this guy know about any of this?” I would defy orders. I mean, in this situation, when the future of human civilization hangs in the balance, to be the person that says, “Yes, launch,” no matter what, I just can’t see a human being on earth being able to do that in the United States of America. That’s a hell of a decision. Like, this is it. That’s it.…

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