This year was a sadistic joke, and the most critical issues in our country and our world were the punchline. So why wouldn't we learn two days before Christmas that Donald Trump is fully prepared to re-escalate the nuclear arms race with Russia?

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BREAKING: Trump to #morningjoe on the nukes tweet: 'Let it be an arms race' https://t.co/X9FMNtgKPK — Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) December 23, 2016

"Maybe he wants to keep the world off-balance." Well, he sure as hell succeeded. The only issue is that this is not, for instance, a renegotiation of the casino workers' pension fund in Atlantic City. It is geopolitics with nuclear holocaust on the line.

Luckily, The Washington Post's David Ignatius arrived to bring some (non-heartening) reason:

"I think his initial move is to unbalance things, to disrupt, to say the unsayable. The problem is when he gets cornered on that...he sometimes doubles down. And I think that's the thing that, as I talk to world leaders, diplomatic veterans who've served in Republican administrations, they worry about this. That you can create space, but the space is there then to be able to negotiate. Not to throw more wood on the fire with another statement."

It seems Trump's international strongman circus act now includes a riff on weapons of mass destruction. But as many are helpfully reminding us this morning, the United States and the Soviet Union decided to deescalate for a reason: The 1983 Soviet false alarm incident.

This is not a drill.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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