International affairs now includes a kindergarten-like spitball match over who’s got a bigger button. It’s Donald Trump’s Jock and Awe social media strategy. And the press just laps it up. “He puts stability on the table, I think, as an issue, his stability. The president of the United States, his stability,” said Mike Barnicle at the start of MSNBC’s Morning Joe this morning, where the very first topic was, well, you can guess.

Unless you were doing a final holiday Netflix binge-watching of Mindhunter or Showtime’s Homeland—please, don’t admit, as I must, that I chaperoned kids to “Pitch Perfect 3”—you probably couldn’t avoid President Trump’s tweet: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”

Alisyn Camerota called it “eyebrow raising” on CNN’s New Day though, no surprise, there was rather less critical response on Trump & Friends. Indeed, Trump was portrayed as tough-minded, cagey truth-teller whose admonishments are working, even prodding North Korea to call South Korea about participating in next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea. There was no talk about mental stability, as was distinctly the case on MSNBC and CNN (All this North Korean stuff “is hugely abnormal as it relates to the presidency, it is not hugely abnormal as it relates to Donald Trump and his life,” opined CNN’s Chris Cillizza, in what appeared a distinction without much of a difference, its patina of historical context aside).

Let’s see. One could also ask an actual and bright White House correspondent, such as Major Garrett of CBS News or Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, about this. Or a shrink. Or, perhaps better still, John Mecklin, Texas-based editor in chief of the Chicago-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (you know them from their fabled “Doomsday Clock”).

Mecklin has previously argued that Kim Jong Un is neither nuts nor suicidal and, as telling, “In light of the undeniable reality of mutual deterrence, the North Korean ‘crisis’ of 2017 can most accurately be seen as a media puppet show put on by Chairman Kim and President Trump for their own public relations purposes.” And, in his mind, the press aids and abets a lot of the mutual craziness.

His point: yes, this is all pretty dangerous, but “In the current overheated media environment, some piece of international theater by Kim or Trump—undertaken for political effect or negotiating edge or ego gratification—could become so magnified by breathless, 24-7 repetition on cable TV and the Internet that it becomes seen as a humiliating national insult.”

Of course, somebody might do something really stupid. But as far as buttons?

“I don’t pretend to understand President Trump’s tweeting practices and have no idea whether there is some method behind their apparent madness,” Mecklin said Tuesday evening, making clear he was speaking for himself. “I can restate the obvious: The United States will almost certainly not attack North Korea, because the result would be at least hundreds of thousands—and probably millions—of dead people. And North Korea will not attack the United States or its South Korean and Japanese allies, because to do so would constitute almost instant national suicide.”

But, for sure, “There is a danger to Trump’s North Korean tweets: They increase the probability that North Korea will misinterpret normal military exercises as an attack and respond with force. This could result in a back-and-forth series of military actions that might—actually, really—lead to worldwide thermonuclear war and the end of the human experiment.”