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Sometimes I wonder whether President Trump simply doesn’t think before he speaks or whether he has a weird compulsion to blow up the world.

It happened again Wednesday during his harangue at the Republican Midterm Convention, which was really a fancy name for a Trump campaign rally. Amid the usual rants of self-puffery and other fictions, he said this:

If [Iran] had a nuclear weapon, I’d be calling the Supreme Leader and I’d be saying, ‘Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’—as opposed to bombing the crap out of him.

If [Iran] had a nuclear weapon, I’d be calling the Supreme Leader and I’d be saying, ‘Mr. Supreme Leader, how are you, sir? Is there anything we can do for you?’—as opposed to bombing the crap out of him.

Many in the audience laughed and applauded, when they should have gasped or moaned. Trump added, “We cannot let them have a nuclear weapon, it’s very simple”—as if that were the lesson of his little tale.

But the lesson that any world leader—friend, foe, or in between—would draw from this speech is simpler still: I need to get some nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.

Trump is telling the world’s leaders that he might bomb the crap out of them at any moment, or treat them like crap as a whim—but he would kiss the hems of their garments, bestow them with whatever favors they request, if they got themselves some nukes.

Maybe this is why he treats Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping,........

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