Former President Donald Trump, during his tenure in the White House, reportedly wanted to strike Kim Jong Un's North Korea.
What Happened: Trump floated the idea of striking Kim's isolated nation with a nuclear weapon and blaming the attack on another country, according to excerpts of New York Times journalist Michael Schmidt's book "Donald Trump v. the United States" shared by NBC News.
The report noted that Trump spent much of 2017 suggesting "behind closed doors in the Oval Office" that he wanted to attack Pyongyang.
See Also: Is Trump Still In Touch With Kim Jong Un, Putin? New Book Has Surprising Revelations
According to the book, Kellyanne Conway, then advisor to Trump, attempted to dissuade the president from the idea, saying the U.S. would likely be caught if it went through with such a plan, but he seemed dogged about "the possibility of launching a preemptive military attack against North Korea."
"What scared Kelly even more than the tweets was the fact that behind closed doors in the Oval Office, Trump continued to talk as if he wanted to go to war. He cavalierly discussed the idea of using a nuclear weapon against North Korea, saying that if he took such an action, the administration could blame someone else for it to absolve itself of responsibility," Schmidt writes in the soon-to-be-released afterword of the 2020 book.
Meanwhile, Last year in March, shortly after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, reports indicated that Trump told a room full of Republican National Committee donors that Washington should "put the Chinese flag" on a bunch of F-22 jets and "bomb the shit" out of Russia.
He added that later, "we say, China did it, we didn't do it, and then they start fighting with each other, and we sit back and watch."
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