Yeah, it’s the administration that’s more concerned with the optics and about itself than about the country at large that would be the dangerous wildcard here.
Even setting aside the current criminal regime and their utter incompetence, if you mentally rewind back through US administrations from Biden back to ~Eisenhower, you’ll find a variety of likely gravitas under fire. From both parties.
Yes but a political answer that dooms the country to nuclear annihilation is also a bad political answer.
Again, if the administration wants to look tough there are a vast array of possible answers that do not include launching everything against everyone.
It worries me that this is not clear to everybody, specially taking in account the entity currently holding the nuclear football.
If a nuke hit Chicago, I would think that polling and social-media would rank pretty low on a president’s list of priorities in the moment. There might not even be any subsequent elections to worry about.
I’d like to think so, but it may not be true with our current president. These people are about “controlling the narrative” above all else. There was a recent NYT article about Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, talking about this as a priority above all else. Some of his underlings were astonished because they felt there was actual, factual work to do after emergencies.
Unfortunately, I can easily imagine a major city being nuked and Trump going on social media to blame it on the woke liberals there. Or denying it really was nuclear. Or most importantly, that it wasn’t his fault and we’re better off without a FEMA response anyway.