The Charge Against Trump

Ok, as far as it goes.

Now sit back and think.  You’re going to have trouble with this one, and it’s on purpose.

You — or Donald Trump — are The President.

It is a bright, sunny day with the wind out of the WNW at 15mph, a fairly typical day by Chicago standards.

A man is dropped off at O’Hare airport.  It happens every day tens of thousands of times.  He grabs a luggage cart, loads his bags on it, and proceeds into the ticketing area.

As soon as he gets there he presses a piece of the largest bag which opens, revealing a keypad, a small display, and up pops a mast, which immediately casts an obvious laser circle around the cart.

He raises his hands above his head in an obvious surrender and proclaims:

Allah Akhbar; in 2 hours this nuclear device will detonate.  If you touch it the bomb goes off immediately.  I surrender.

He is of course arrested, and the police officers observe that indeed the display on the suitcase shows 01:58:30, and is counting down.  There is also what looks like a phone keypad with a red light on it.

The arrested man is Middle-Eastern in appearance and offers that a six-digit code will disarm the bomb, if the laser protective circle is breached you have 2 minutes before it goes off and you get three tries, after which the detonator fires.  The man who was arrested also claims to know what the code is.

A quick-response team arrives and confirms that the suitcase is emitting neutrons and a modest amount of gamma.  It therefore has to be presumed that indeed there is a nuclear device inside the suitcase, although there is utterly no way to know for sure if what’s in there will go “boom” or not.

Here are the facts: The wind is out of the WNW.  If the bomb detonates, assuming it is nuclear, the immediate destruction will kill virtually everyone in a circle approximating the boundaries of Des Plaines, Park Ridge, Elk Grove Village and about halfway down 294 to the 290 interchange, incinerating pretty-much everything in that area.  The plume of radioactive debris will travel @ 15 mph straight toward the center of Chicago, and in about one hour will reach the lakefront.  This will kill a huge percentage of the population of the city (I remind you that the city itself numbers a couple of million with ~7 million in the greater Chicagoland area) and render essentially the entire city core unusable by anyone for several years.  At least 100,000 will die instantly, and approximately 20% of those within the cone from the airport to the lakefront reaching the north and Hyde Park ends of Lake Shore Drive will succumb to acute radiation poisoning within 30 days — that is, somewhere between 500,00 and 1 million immediate casualties.

It is physically impossible to call an evacuation of an area of that size within two hours and attempting to do so will cause immediate mass-panic.  Since the attempt would cause virtually everyone to be outside and unprotected announcing same would likely increase the number of deaths by a huge amount.

Your choices are as follows, roughly:

• Attempt to disarm the bomb.  EOD is called and places the odds of success at 10%.
• Watch roughly a million people die, but personally try to get to minimum safe distance west of the device out I-90 before it goes off.

• Do whatever you can, damn the Constitution and individual rights, to get the disarm code.

You want my answer?  Here it is:

I’d place the rat bastard somewhere that I calculated would result in being burned horribly by the blast, killing him with certainty — but such that he’d die slowly and very badly.  Things would get far more ugly from there in a very big hurry.

I might get the code out of him and I might not.

Now you can argue all you want that such an act is inhumane.  But really, in a situation like this, it comes down to one ******* who has declared war on you or a million innocent people and you have no other way to prevent them from dying.  You might fail, in fact you probably will, but would you actually sit still and let all those people be incinerated without trying?

I would not, and if you claim you would, I argue you’re a monster.

Trump is simply saying what logically would have to happen under such an extreme circumstance. He’s not saying he’d like doing it, just that he’d do it.  Well, for what it’s worth I’d do it too, and maybe that would be your wife, daughter, son, or yourself that might not die that day as a consequence.

Yes, win or lose I’d have to bear on my soul what I did to that terrorist — or what was left of him.  That’s ok.  That’s the price of having the left seat; you have to make the tough, nasty decisions, including ones that have no good answers, only weighing the bad ones and choosing what you believe is less-bad.

Do you want someone who both can do that and will admit to it up front as a Commander in Chief?

I do.

And by the way, this sort of scenario is not all that far-fetched.

It may seem so, but after Brussels….. is it really?