The Slatest

Bobby Knight Praises Donald Trump for Being Willing to Start a Nuclear War

Donald Trump and Bobby Knight in Indianapolis on April 27.

John Sommers II/Getty Images

Here’s what Bobby Knight had to say today in Evansville, Indiana about Donald Trump’s qualifications to be president and the question of whether his demeanor is “presidential” enough:

“We gotta talk about this presidential crap just for a moment here. I’ll tell you who they said wasn’t presidential. I don’t even know what the hell presidential means, but they told him he wasn’t presidential. And that guy they told all these people that wanted to say, you’re not presidential, that guy was Harry Truman.

“And Harry Truman, with what he did in dropping and having the guts to drop the bomb in 1944 saved, saved millions of American lives. And that’s what Harry Truman did. And he became one of the three great presidents of the United States. And here’s a man who would do the same thing, because he’s going to become one of the four great presidents of the United States.”

When Harry Truman “became one of the three great presidents of the United States” (?!?) by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States was the only country that had nuclear weapons. Now at least nine countries have them, a list which includes Russia, China, Pakistan (!), and North Korea (!!FML!!!!1). There is not any nation-state with which the U.S. could conceivably be engaged in large-scale, existentially threatening conventional warfare (as we were with Japan) that we could drop a nuclear weapon on without inducing an instant retaliatory strike that could possibly itself lead to the end of all life on Earth. Meanwhile, the members of groups like ISIS and al-Qaida are intentionally dispersed across the world among civilian populations so that we can’t induce their surrender by vaporizing some particular location with a hydrogen bomb.

It’s possible that we should not take Bobby Knight’s advice about nuclear warfare.