Trump embarrassed himself and unnerved Americans on Tuesday by echoing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s belligerent tone, rekindling concerns that he will either overreact or just not be taken seriously in an international standoff that could spin dangerously out of control. This morning there was no improvement. The Post reports:

President Trump continued to forcefully threaten North Korea on Wednesday, asserting that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is “far stronger and more powerful than ever before.” Trump’s projection of U.S. nuclear strength comes during a moment of rhetorical brinkmanship between him and North Korea’s erratic leader, Kim Jong-Un. Trump used extraordinarily chilling language for a U.S. president on Tuesday afternoon when he warned that North Korea’s nuclear provocations would be “met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

His boast is as gratuitous as it is inaccurate in suggesting he improved our arsenal in just seven months. (“Trump’s suggestion that the nuclear arsenal already has been modernized under his presidency is misleading at best, considering the process could take years. On Jan. 27, one week after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order directing the Defense Department to launch a Nuclear Posture Review, a major undertaking that will set his administration’s nuclear policy.”) It’s this kind of inaccurate, self-aggrandizing utterance that leads to a loss of confidence in the president’s ability to navigate through treacherous waters.

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This sort of slow-motion meltdown and loss of discipline is precisely what Kelly was brought on to prevent. But, unfortunately, he seems to have a view of his job that is ill-suited to serve his current boss. The Post reports that he is acting as an honest broker, not as a moderating or restraining force:

Passing up opportunities to craft policies, Kelly has acted as a neutral mediator — encouraging key players to argue their points, ensuring proposals are fully vetted and then presenting the options to the president. … White House officials said Kelly sees his role as executing the president’s orders, not modulating them — and they were quick to point out that Kelly managed some of Trump’s most controversial priorities with stubborn determination, including immigration and border enforcement, as secretary of homeland security.

And that’s the nub of the problem. Kelly, used to saluting and taking orders, seems unwilling to manage up, to persuade Trump to put down his phone, to stop obsessing over TV coverage and, most important, to avoid inflaming the North Korea situation. Kelly’s method would work in a run-of-the-mill White House where the real problem was, for example, lack of coordination between the White House and Cabinet departments, or meetings that ran too long or reached no resolution. The main problem in this administration has always been Trump — and the unwillingness or inability of anyone, including relatives, to restrain his worst instincts. The time to stop humoring Trump, telling him what he wants to hear and shielding him from bad news, has long since passed.

Kelly has been a passive bystander as Trump has ratcheted up his war rhetoric. The results, former State Department official and #NeverTrump-er Eliot Cohen points out, have been disastrous:

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Maybe it is all bluff. If it is, Trump will inflict a dangerous wound to American foreign policy, for his threats will probably be shown to be hollow. If loose words about fire and fury are a mere negotiating tactic, they will not deliver what the United States desires, because the North Koreans have every reason to want nuclear weapons, and have shown an impressive unwillingness to yield to pressure, even from their main ally and trading partner China, in acquiring them. … It is equally conceivable, and more likely, however, [if military action is actually taken] that the outcome could be a ferocious war that would lead to the overthrow of the North Korean regime, but could kill hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of America’s Asian allies, and thousands of American troops and their numerous dependents.

Kelly apparently has not impressed upon Trump the impossibility of conducting a war on short notice. “The United States is simply not ready for a war in Korea, even if one were the lesser of two evils. It is not ready for wartime diplomacy to manage fearful or furious allies, let alone the Chinese and the Russians,” Cohen explains. “The Department of State does not even have a nominee for the position of assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and its secretary presides over a demoralized and shrinking corps of diplomats. The American military may have the aircraft to hammer North Korean nuclear sites, but it is also fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and returning to Europe to bolster deterrence there. The armed services have suffered years of sequester-imposed spending freezes that mean that they have not refurbished their arsenals or engaged in adequate training.”