If he were president, Donald Trump-who likes to say he doesn't spend a lot of time conferring with others ("My primary consultant is myself," he declared in March)-would be free to launch a civilization-ending nuclear war on his own any time he chose. They’re not gonna refuse me”-imposes more legal constraints on a president than ordering a nuclear attack. Even ordering the use of torture-which Trump infamously once said he would do, insisting the military “won’t refuse. There is no second-guessing by the Supreme Court. There is no advice and consent by the Senate. You might imagine this awesome executive power would be hamstrung with checks and balances, but by law, custom and congressional deference there may be no responsibility where the president has more absolute control. With a single phone call, the commander in chief has virtually unlimited power to rain down nuclear weapons on any adversarial regime and country at any time.
What would it mean to have Trump’s fingers on the nuclear button? We don't really know, but we do know this: In the atomic age, when decisions must be made very quickly, the presidency has evolved into something akin to a nuclear monarchy. But these points are not mutually exclusive. And it’s not just Trump’s general-election opponent, Hillary Clinton, who’s hinting at this his former GOP rival, Marco Rubio, repeated his earlier concerns about Trump only this week, saying America can't give "the nuclear codes of the United States to an erratic individual." Others would side with Trump’s view that the weapons themselves-which pack a destructive force amounting to “Hiroshima times a thousand,” as he put it-are the evil. Some people believe that Trump himself is the maniac, the madman with nukes that appears in Trump’s own worst nightmare. To a degree we haven’t seen, perhaps, since the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, the question of Donald Trump’s temperament and judgment on matters of war and peace is stirring attention-and trepidation, particularly when the subject of nuclear weapons comes up.
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