Nuclear tensions between the US and North Korea have become personal once again, with President Donald Trump boasting that he has a bigger nuclear button than Kim Jong Un.
The President, who has previously given Kim the mocking sobriquet “Rocket Man”, responded to the North Korean dictator’s warning about the “nuclear button” on his desk with a size comparison whose euphemistic overtones were hard to miss:
On social media, US citizens and foreigners alike responded with disbelief as Trump turned Pyongyang’s nuclear threat into a button-measuring contest:
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Coming so early in the new year, the president’s take on the North Korean nuclear crisis was all too much for some:
A 2016 remark by Hillary Clinton about her then-rival for the White House seemed all too timely for some:
While others simply hoped that preventative measures have already been taken:
Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Army veteran who lost her legs in Iraq, highlighted the risk to US service personnel stationed in South Korea, dismissing Trump as “Cadet Bone Spurs” - a reference to the medical condition which kept him from being drafted in the Vietnam war.
Many argued that Twitter should remove the tweet or even shut down the president’s account altogether rather than risk the social media platform becoming the launchpad for a nuclear apocalypse:
However, comedian Matt Oswalt had a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint:
But while many saw the outlandish game of “nuclear chicken” as a sign of an unhinged mind, retired linguistics professor George Lakoff claimed that there is canny political method in Trump’s apparent Twitter madness:
