Democratic Rep. David Cicilline has claimed President Donald Trump is risking nuclear war with North Korea, authorizing a missile strike on a Syrian airbase and using the MOAB (mother of all bombs) in the Nangarhar province of Afghanistan, to bump up his own popularity.
Rep. Cicilline, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, believes that any preemptive strike against North Korea could lead to a war, and even more, a nuclear war.
“A preemptive strike, if it were to happen, is likely to ignite a very serious conflict, a war, and maybe even a nuclear war,” Cicilline said to MSNBC’s Ali Velshi. “It would expose American troops on the [Korean] peninsula to tremendous danger … The appropriate course is to really to reduce the rhetoric and try to de-escalate this and continue to use all the levers of diplomatic-economic power to try to achieve the right results here. And obviously, a preemptive strike has tremendously serious consequences that may well ignite a very significant war … This is very serious. I think what we have to be sure is that the president understands the implications of this kind of military action.”
Cicilline told Velshi that he “fears” Trump wouldn’t mind risking a nuclear war just to improve his popularity.
“What I fear is, [Trump] sort of got a political bump, he got a political bump from the Syria airstrike [and] the mother of all bombs strike in Afghanistan,” Cicilline said. “And we don’t want the president to be making decisions where he just sort of thinks more bombs are the way to build up his popularity, but rather they’re making decisions based on the national security interests of the United States and the long-term safety and security of the American people.”
Ever since Trump became the president, Cicilline has been one of the harshest critics of his administration and its decisions.
Earlier this year, in February, Cicilline said that the Trump presidency is similar to the Netflix science fiction TV show, “Stranger Things.”
“Like the main characters in ‘Stranger Things,’ we are now stuck in the Upside Down,” Cicilline said. “Right is wrong, up is down, black is white.”
The Upside Down is portrayed as a petrifying mirror-image of the real world, in the show, where monsters are shown to roam free and kill innocent people.
Elaborating on his reference to the TV show, Cicilline said, “This is not a TV show. This is real life. We have a president unlike any we have ever known. And like Mike, Dustin, Lucas and Eleven, we must remain focused on the task at hand and hold this administration accountable so we can escape from our own version of the Upside Down.”