plan. seeing somewhat dismissive of the general, the man on the ground tlr for more than 18 months now. let me ask you about the news we ve been following all night. not just this reported dia conclusion and assessment that north korea has miniaturized nuclear warhead. we ve obviously heard that from dia in the past. but we ve also seen this threat from the president, basically threatening force against north korea. does that appear to have been an off-the-cuff threat from the president or did that come as part of a strategy? i don t get the sense it was any part of a strategy at all. what it is, is this building rhetoric between the u.s. and north korea. which we saw, of course, kim jong-un respond to by threatening guam. he said the capability of hitting guam for some time now, and the u.s. has responded by building up a military presence there, more than what existed, putting forward b-1 bombers into and over the korean peninsula,
of north korea. the ones under siege are the north koreans, with icbms aimed at america s west coast. our president refuses to blink. he s outfoxing the north korean dictator. how he will solve the missile crisis just like jfk. i mean, where do you look to figure out what the president just did as part of a plan? just an aberration, something feeling to say in the moment or part of the way he sees his presidency as going? we have no idea what s going on inside the president s head. and we don t know whether it s just inside his head alone or a plan of his administration. but we ve really never had an american president playing i m rubber, you re glue with the north koreans before. so there is a brand-new, totally unprecedented craziness and surrealism problem in the u.s.-north korean relationship. for the first time includes our own government. you can take that separate and
what if donald trump decides that he doesn t like the maneuvers that north korea has undertaken. we re about to have joint u.s. and south korean exercises at the end of august. what if the north koreans decide that is actually a pretext for a preemptive attack on them, so they mobilize. the u.s. then responds. somebody fires something, and bang, it s off to the races in the most catastrophic war we ve seen. we ve been at war over 16 years in the middle east and south africa. we don t know this war. we don t know what a korean war would look like. the president s right about that. a korean war would be unlike anyone has seen since the end of world war ii. joe, thank you for being here, my friend. i appreciate your help tonight. thank you, rachel. all right. much more ahead tonight. busy news night. including just as we were going to air, some breaking news in the investigation into russia s attack on our election that involves the trump campaign
beyond a normal statement. and as i said, they will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. thank you. no, thank you. as a world, we re not happy about it, but we re used to north korea threatening to turn things into a sea of fire. we re not used to ha from an american president, from any american president. so this as the new variable in what is already an insane relationship, this is genuinely new. as is the just wild incoherence of the administration beyond the president. in terms of how they re handling this ongoing big problem, this international threat. two and a half weeks ago, mike pompeio said that basically, yes, the united states wants regime change in north korea. then last week, trump s secretary of state rex tillerson said the united states definitely does not want regime
intentionally start such a war, but that they could stumble into it, a miscalculation, a miscommunication, a misunderstanding, it could quickly escalate. look at what north korea just did. they just threatened guam. hours after the president of the united states said that if you threaten us again, you ll be met with fire and fury. they are blowing through this president s red lines like tissue paper. what is trump going to do now? when the north koreans make threats to the united states, it s become something that s treated lk comedically in this country because they re so over the top, and because whether or not things are badly translated, their rhetoric is so hyperbolic that we end up sort of getting used to it and treating it like it s a joke. president trump echoed that today by saying we re going to be unleashing fury and fire and power like the world has never seen. is there something to be said for him speaking their language? is there anything that we know about how they mig