Jake Tapper on Trump's nuke threat: "None of this is, frankly, stable behavior."

Donald Trump kicked off the first week of the new year by watching a Fox News clip on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and then casually threatening to nuke him on Twitter with his “bigger button.”

It was a stupefying moment that once again revealed Trump has absolutely no concept for the scale or human mortality of atomic weapons.

Delivering a report on Tuesday night, CNN correspondent Jake Tapper did not mince words in criticizing Trump’s nuclear outburst:

President Ronald Reagan once said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” President Kennedy said, “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.” And President Trump this evening, he’s in a back and forth with Kim Jong Un about whose nuclear button is bigger and whose is more powerful. It may be difficult for some of you at home to wrap your minds around a U.S. president who makes statements like this about the use of nuclear weapons, which would, of course, murder millions of people. […]

This is the president of the United States issuing a threat to use nuclear weapons, and then turning around and glibly chastising the media. These tweets coming on the same day that President Trump also suggested that a former Hillary Clinton aide, who has been charged with no crime, should be jailed, and said the former FBI director, who was a witness in the investigation into the Trump campaign, should be investigated himself. And said that his own Justice Department is part of a conspiracy known as the, quote, “Deep State.”

None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. None of this is, frankly, stable behavior.

Nothing from Trump’s experiences in the Oval Office seems to have made him understand that a nuclear war is unwinnable. Behind closed doors, he proposed increasing the nuclear arsenal tenfold, which reportedly prompted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to call him a “fucking moron.”

But his relentless provocations of the North Korean despot are getting completely out of hand. The lives of millions of people in several countries take a backseat to the burnishment of Trump’s own ego.

America needs to have stable leadership. And as Tapper makes clear, we have nothing of the sort.