It's almost a courtesy from President Trump: rather than get our hopes up with calm, careful, magnanimous tweets to kick off the new year, we're back into freezing cold reality. None of the president's nine tweets Tuesday morning were particularly reassuring to those of us concerned about the future of our country or planet. That particularly goes for those of us who think thermonuclear war sounds like kind of a drag. One such Concerned Citizen is Stephen Colbert, who assessed Trump's Twitter parlay with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during his first Late Show gig of 2018:
"'We'll see?'" Colbert said. "That's a little nonchalant. Maybe it will lead to peace," he continued, channelling the president. "Maybe it'll lead to thermonuclear war. No way of knowing. I, as president, would do something about it, but I'm too busy keeping all the planes in the sky."
That, of course, was a reference to another Trump Tweet of the Day, in which he claimed credit for there being no commercial airline crashes last year:
Soon enough, The Hill was reporting that Trump's aviation heroics were achieved despite the fact that privatizing air traffic controllers was his only major air travel initiative. That failed in Congress, though a White House spokesman cited it and "new vetting procedures for foreign travelers" in a statement explaining the tweet. Also, there's this:
As Colbert pointed out, Kim Jong-un attempted to extend a bit of an olive branch to start out the new year. However, we can safely assume President Trump doesn't like olives. By Tuesday evening, shortly after Colbert taped his show, the president was tweetin' agin. We were treated to a Freudian masterpiece that could prove a real bummer for Planet Earth.
My big, powerful button. There's a real macabre fascination to our current national experiment, wherein we've given unprecedented powers of destruction to an obviously stunted man whose mind is stuck in a high-school locker room. In case you were wondering, there is not actually a button on the president's desk—besides the one with which he summons a butler to bring him Diet Cokes, which he apparently presses 12 times a day. However, it is within this individual's power to unilaterally launch a nuclear weapon at any time. Once again, Happy Freakin' New Year.
Increasingly, it looks like President Big Button's New Years resolution was to tweet more. Here was another official communication from the President of the United States of America, which came right on the back of his assurance that his button works:
The Game Show Presidency continues. If we're lucky enough to survive this fun little era, few will feel ashamed to have made that list.
