Friday morning Donald Trump was pressed by an MSNBC reporter to clarify his tweet from Thursday about expanding the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
Rather than back off his tweet, he doubled down arguing that if a nuclear arms race ensues, so be it.
Here’s more from Newsmax:
“We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all,” Trump also told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski when she got on the phone with the president-elect, who had called to speak with newly named Press Secretary Sean Spicer following his interview with the “Morning Joe” program.
Brzezinski reported that Trump had told her the statement when she asked him to comment on a tweet the president-elect made on Thursday that shocked nuclear non-proliferation experts, who said boosting the U.S. arsenal could help fuel already-tense global relations.
He gave no further details about that tweet, and on Friday morning, as news broke of his comments to Brzezinski, Trump did not post further tweets about the issue, but instead took to Twitter to complain that son Eric had been forced to quit soliciting money for his childhood cancer charity.
Trump’s comments also were not broadcast live on the show, nor was recording of him making them played, with Brzezinski instead reporting the conversation.
Washington Post columnist and executive editor David Ignatius, on the program’s panel commented that often, Trump will make stunning comments to “unbalance things” or to “disrupt” a conversation by saying the “unsayable.”
