GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump said Wednesday he’d consider using a nuclear weapon against the Islamic State if the terror group launches an assault against the U.S.
In a town hall put on by MSNBC, host Chris Matthews asked Trump to give an answer on the use of nuclear weapons, and Trump, in usual fashion, responded, “I would never take any of my cards off the table.”
And while Trump said he doesn’t think he’d deploy nuclear weapons in Europe, he also again added he would never say no for certain, The Hill reports.
He then went on the offensive and called Matthews a “bad negotiator” for wanting to definitively rule out some options from the get-go, namely nuclear weapons.
Deploying nuclear weapons in Europe may be startling, and for Trump, that is likely the point. Trump has previously asserted the necessity of being unpredictable.
Other observers, like former CIA Director Michael Hayden, has characterized Trump’s foreign policy as “incoherent,” and has previously remarked that if the GOP frontrunner wants to restart the practice of waterboarding, he’ll have to bring his own bucket. As Hayden put it, the CIA simply no longer trusts the White House to protect its interrogators, and that deep distrust is not about to die any time soon, even if a Republican takes back the executive. While CIA interrogators waterboarded with regret and angst, Hayden noted that Trump’s policy of waterboarding sounds overly enthusiastic and not suitably based on information extraction.
Aside from Hayden, virtually the entire GOP national security establishment has blasted Trump for thinking success in real estate deals fluidly crosses over to expertise in the foreign policy field. Still, for Republican voters who prioritize national security, Trump outshines the other candidates as the most preferred by far.
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