Donald Trump's Question About Nuclear Weapons Is Absolutely Terrifying

On Wednesday, Joe Scarborough of "Morning Joe" told Ret. General Michael Hayden – the former head of the CIA and NSA – that an unnamed foreign policy expert who advised Donald Trump said that the Republican presidential nominee asked him several times why the US can't use its nuclear weapons.

Scarborough stated,

Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them, why can't we use them?

This is a terrifying question with an obvious answer: The US can't use its nuclear weapons whenever it pleases because it would likely lead to the destruction of the globe.

America isn't the only country with nuclear weapons. No rational leader with knowledge of their destructive capacity would make the decision to use them on a whim.

A few moments before Scarborough dropped this startling revelation, he asked Hayden what concerns him the most about Donald Trump. Hayden stated,

How erratic he is... He's inconsistent, and when you're the head of a global superpower, inconsistency, unpredictability, those are dangerous things. They frighten your friends and they tempt your enemies.

Trump's question makes it seem like he has a lack of even a basic familiarity with foreign affairs (and the concept of nuclear deterrence), and coincides with Hayden's concerns about the real estate mogul becoming president.

This is hardly the first time Trump has seemed to exhibit a strong lack of familiarity with foreign affairs. It's not even the first time in the past week that something he's said on this topic has made headlines.

So, while we still need further confirmation on Scarborough's startling claims regarding Trump and nuclear weapons, we already have plenty of evidence suggesting that the Republican nominee doesn't seem equipped to handle the challenges of the presidency: particularly when it comes to foreign affairs.

During an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Trump said,

[Russian President Vladimir Putin is] not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He's not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want.

But, as Stephanopoulos highlighted, Putin is already there, given that he annexed Crimea in 2014.

After his comments received criticism, Trump did what he usually does: He took to Twitter in an attempt to correct his mistake.

In the past week or so, Trump has caused controversy over his response to a speech given at the DNC by the father of Captain Humayun Khan, a fallen Muslim American solider.

Amidst all this, Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson suggested that Khan's death was Obama's fault.

But President Obama did not vote for the Iraq War. He was a state senator in Illinois when the war began. Captain Khan died in 2004, long before Obama took the oath of office in January 2009.

Trump has also continuously claimed he did not support the Iraq War before it began, despite evidence to the contrary.

In September 2002, not long before the war began (March 2003), Howard Stern asked the New York billionaire whether he supported the impending invasion of Iraq. Trump replied,

Yeah, I guess so.

This is why it's pretty rich Trump claimed on Tuesday that he knows "far more" about foreign policy than President Obama.