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Threatening to nuke someone is a "violent threat," no?

While Donald Trump was running for President, his Twitter account was an obnoxious clearinghouse of racist MAGA nationalism, unfounded attacks on his opponents, and Pepe avatar replies. Since Donald Trump has become President, his Twitter account... well, honestly, it's still all of those things. But now that he has the power of the office of the presidency behind him, his Twitter has additionally become a place where random and seemingly improvised rants double as actual policy statements. When Trump tweeted about his decision to ban transgender people from the military, it came out that he hadn't even consulted with the heads of various branches of the military. He was just flying by the seat of his golf pants.

This combination of Trump's improvisational style, the immediacy of Twitter, and international politics has proven to be a potent and terrifying one. When news broke that North Korea had successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead, what we'd hope a president would do is gather with his top foreign policy advisers and go over all the implications of what every possible statement could be. How will any statement affect our relationship with South Korea and Japan, countries that are more directly in North Korea's line of fire? How will it affect our relationships with the United Nations, an organization that just unanimously voted to sanction North Korea (which means the not-so-small feat of getting support from China)? How will North Korea receive it and are we escalating or deescalating the situation? But that's not what happened. Instead Trump "improvised" and said that we'd bring "fire" and "fury" like the world has never seen if North Korea keeps threatening us.

This is terrifying as it is, but this morning things got scarier as Trump took his threats to Twitter. Yes, Donald Trump is going to use Twitter as part of his means of handling a Nuclear crisis. This means that the most delicate of all geopolitical conflicts will likely be navigated at the whims of Trump watching Fox News.

So that right there is Donald Trump threatening North Korea with nuclear war via tweet. That's a thing that happened in the real world. GQ's Jay Willis predicted this might happen! This is the latest and most clear-cut example of why we need Twitter to shut down Donald Trump's account. They certainly have cover to, as Kal Penn pointed out this morning:

The fact is, Donald Trump is terrifying without Twitter. He's the kind of President who is going to make sweeping and off-the-cuff statements threatening nuclear war from his golf course. But at least if we limit him to needing to make actual statements to say things, his (few adult) advisers will occasionally get the chance to explain to him why something is a bad idea. But as long as President Trump has Twitter, he will always be exponentially more dangerous. Who knows, if Sean Hannity is in an extra bad mood one night, and makes the case why nuclear war wouldn't be so bad, we may find our President tweeting us into World War III. So please, Twitter. Do the right thing. Delete the President.

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Donald Trump's Twitter Account Is Very Much in Violation of Twitter's Terms of Service - GQ Magazine