Donald Trump emerged from his holiday vacation seemingly resolved to double down on his Twitter regimen, tweeting no fewer than 16 times on Tuesday alone. He praised Lou Dobbs, voiced support for Senator Orrin Hatch, and congratulated himself on the lack of deaths involving commercial aircraft in 2017 (though nobody has died in a commercial domestic airline crash since 2009), but by the end of the day, his commentaries had devolved into still more fist-shaking in the direction of North Korea. “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,’” the president wrote. “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!”

Trump’s tweet was in response to Kim’s New Year’s Day address, in which he said he had a “nuclear button” on his desk and warned that the entirety of the United States mainland was within striking distance of North Korean nuclear missiles. Kim and Trump spent most of 2017 exchanging crude barbs about nuclear war, and the president’s apparent disinclination to change course threw the media into panicked overdrive. “There’s a word for this,” CNN’s Brian Stelter said in his Wednesday morning e-mail newsletter. “Madness. This is madness.” Jake Tapper similarly chimed in on his show Tuesday night, saying, “None of this [is] normal, none of this [is] acceptable, none of this [is] frankly STABLE behavior.” Even Trump administration officials seemed concerned that Trump could tweet the country into a nuclear conflict: “Every war in history was an accident,” one administration insider told Axios. “You just don’t know what’s going to send him over the edge.”

Twitter’s policy on violent threats states that users “may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people,” but those who flagged Trump’s tweet were stonewalled by the tech giant. At least two prominent users who attempted to report the tweet got near-immediate responses from Twitter saying that the company had “reviewed [their] report[s] carefully and found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior.” Twitter itself said in a statement on Tuesday night that Trump’s North Korea tweet wasn’t a “specific threat” and didn’t warrant a suspension or other disciplinary action. In response, some Twitter users planned an “emergency demonstration” outside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.

By now, the Trump-shaped hole in Twitter’s content regulation policies is well documented: in the fall, the company refused to ban the president from its platform even as his threats against North Korea grew more extreme, on the grounds of the “newsworthiness” and “public interest” value of his tweets. When Twitter introduced new abuse policies and guidelines in December, the company formalized its Trump exemption, noting that its policy “does not apply to military or government entities,” but that it would “consider exceptions for groups that are currently engaging in (or have engaged in) peaceful resolution.”

In the midst of his back-and-forth with Trump, Kim opened a cross-border communications channel with South Korea on Wednesday morning for the first time in almost two years. Though there’s no guarantee that the diplomatic situation between the two countries will change, experts speculate that the move could be designed to draw the two Koreas closer together, leaving Trump and his imaginary button out in the cold.