Yesterday, Trump tweeted about how more nuclear weapons are needed, making a lot of people tense and unhappy. Your worries have just doubled down, because Trump has not had a single thought about this, just ran right into things with his brain shut and mouth wide open: now we need an arms race! Gosh, won’t that be fun.

On Friday, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough said President-elect Donald Trump endorsed a nuclear arms race during a brief phone conversation they had with him earlier that morning.

“Mika asked the president-elect when we had the opportunity what his position was on — trying to clarify the tweet yesterday regarding the nuclear arsenal,” Scarborough said, referring to a tweet Trump published on Thursday calling for the United States to “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”

“And the president-elect told you what?” Scarborough said to Brzezinski.

“Let it be an arms race. We will outmatch them at every pass,” she replied. “And outlast them all.”

Trump’s statement directly contradicts the spin spokesman Jason Miller offered Thursday afternoon in an effort to downplay Thursday’s tweet — spin that interpreted Trump’s comments as merely warning about “the threat of nuclear proliferation.”

[…]

Trump’s comments Friday indicate Miller had it wrong. The president-elect is actually endorsing a nuclear arms race, not warning about the dangers of one, because he’s confident the United States would somehow always win.

Trump’s position represents a break from the nonproliferation efforts the United States has led for decades. As ThinkProgress detailed last spring, international nonproliferation agreements reduced the number of operational warheads in the world from a high of 64,452 in 1986 to 10,315 in 2015. The president-elect’s statements suggest that downward trend will come to an end.

Friday is far from the first time Trump said reckless things about nuclear weapons. During an interview last March with Chris Matthews, Trump said he was open to using nukes if the situation called for it and questioned why we’d make them if we never intended to use them. During a Fox News interview the next day, Trump wouldn’t even rule out the possibility of using nukes in Europe.

“Europe is a big place,” Trump said. “I’m not going to take cards off the table. We have nuclear capability.”

“Europe is a big place.” The sheer idiocy of this man makes me despair. Trump is the compleat ignoramus, an Ignoramus’s Ignoramus. No attention span. No knowledge. No ability to think. No mindfulness. He doesn’t read, at all. No books, no newspapers, nothing. He “skims, glances”. Christ, we are so fucked.

In response to a subsequent question about what steps might stand in the way of Trump using nukes if he becomes president, Hayden said, “The system is designed for speed and decisiveness. It’s not designed to debate the decision.”

That’s reassuring. (For the sarcasm impaired: heavy sarcasm.)

Via Think Progress.