Day One

What if it was like this?

From “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”

The president walks briskly onto the stage. The White House press corps falls silent.

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning.

HALL: Good morning.

THE PRESIDENT: Just six months ago, fate, with a little help from the Internet (laughter), brought me a brief moment of national attention. And as I basked in that sun, it was suggested, half as a joke, that I should run for president.

I replied, “No thanks.”

The idea kept coming up. I pointed out that I was an ordinary American with no funding, and that I didn’t want any funding, and I said that the job of being a U.S. president looked pretty miserable. But I also made a little speech about what the next president should do. A campaign to elect me the 47th U.S. president unexpectedly snowballed.

And so, here we are — fresh from my completely unexpected inauguration this morning. We are in the first 100 days. This is my first official press conference. Shortly I’ll take your questions.

First, though, I have ten announcements. Each makes formal things I’ve already promised, so none of this should surprise. (Pulls a folder from the podium, holds it up). I like paper notes — no teleprompters, and as you can see, we’ve had the teleprompter technology removed from the room. (Laughter and muttering from the press).

Announcement No. 1: As Commander in Chief, I am ordering the U.S. military to take all nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert.

What does this mean? Well, until this moment, if our computer systems detected — or thought they detected — an incoming missile attack on our country, the Pentagon would rush to the President with an ultimatum: To decide, usually in less than half an hour, whether to launch our own nuclear missiles at — somebody.

As you know, this idea of launching a world-ending war after one panicky briefing — this has been criticized for decades as unnecessary and incredibly dangerous. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama campaigned (as did I) on taking our nuclear weapons off of hair-trigger alert.

(OUTBURST FROM HALL).

PRESIDENT: I’m not taking questions yet — Reuters is it? —

REUTERS: It’s shocking to hear that you’re actually doing this, since it seems to invite a first-strike nuclear attack —

PRESIDENT: That’s absurd. Look, here’s a hypothetical: A missile has been launched at Washington from a submarine just off of our East Coast and it will strike the city in 10 minutes. What should we do?

REUTERS: It would depend on who our intelligence indicated was —

PRESIDENT: Now you’ve got nine minutes. The Pentagon says Russia has the most submarines, so “playing odds it’s Russia.” Should we nuke Russia? Just launch some nuclear warheads at Russia? What if we’re wrong, what if it was North Korea? Or what if it’s a rogue Russian submarine commander, acting all on his own? What if the incoming missile impacts on the Washington Mall and it’s not even a nuclear weapon?

REUTERS: We have to be willing to launch in minutes to deter exactly this kind of attack!

PRESIDENT: That’s not true, and what you say doesn’t even make sense.

First, let’s acknowledge something: If that hypothetical missile was armed with a nuclear warhead, then when those 10 minutes were up, Washington would be gone. Vaporized. It wouldn’t matter whether we launched all of our weapons, or none of our weapons. I’d be dead, you’d be dead (uncomfortable muttering), the nation’s capital would be obliterated, and the U.S. continuity of government program would be initiated. We’d still have 14 nuclear-armed submarines floating in the oceans, completely undetectable, awaiting orders. Any one of those 14 submarines carries more nuclear firepower than all other nations save Russia. Each of those 14 submarines carries enough nuclear firepower to destroy a continent — in fact, enough to create a nuclear winter that would lead to mass starvation and basically the end of all civilization.

Now, it is disquieting that we have given 14 essentially anonmyous people — I’m referring to the captains of each of these submarines — control of push-button-world-ending technology. To be precise, we don’t always have all 14 subs at sea, because some may put in to port for maintenance and such. At the same time, there are also a lot more than 14 captains to worry about, because each of these submarines has two crews, a Blue crew and a Gold crew, that alternate taking the sub out. So, you’ve got 28 captains who, in the course of a year, say, will be entrusted with world-ending weapons — world-ending weapons. Of those 28 captains, two of them in the past year have been relieved of their commands after having been arrested for driving while intoxicated on alcohol — the commander of the blue crew for the U.S.S. Georgia was relieved of duty after a DUI in January, and the commander of the yellow crew for the U.S.S. Ohio was relieved of duty after a DUI in March. So, they’re fallible humans — just like the rest of us. We’ve put 28 fallible humans in charge of push-button-world-ending technology, which is terrifying and also needs to be discussed soon.

For now, though, the bright side of having 14 undetectable nuclear submarines out there is that we don’t need to keep all of the other missiles on hair-trigger alert. If we were attacked, the remnants of the U.S. government could take 24 hours to decide how to respond, or could take one month. There’s no need for hair-trigger alert panic launches. It’s crazy that they’ve persisted until this very morning — but now, those policies are canceled.

Announcement No. 2: As promised, I am ordering an immediate halt to every foreign covert military or influence operation by the CIA, or any other arm of the U.S. national security state. (Lots of muttering in the hall, some clapping.) So, CIA: As of today, if you are running a covert military or influence operation abroad, you must have explicit, written permission from the new director of national intelligence to continue. And you are unlikely to get it, given your terrible track record.

This is the first step in a major, public reevaluation of the intelligence community’s 75 year reign of what I believe to have been wildly criminal behavior. It’s long overdue. We will pick up where the Church Committee left off — 50 years ago! South Africa had its Truth and Reconciliation Committee, the Soviet Union / Russia had Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost, and America will now have its own clear-eyed review of what’s been done in our name abroad.

Announcement No. 3: The detention center at Guantanamo Bay will be officially closed within 30 days. Before that deadline, the remaining 30 prisoners held there will be remanded to a United States-based prison. Their cases will all rapidly be heard at a jury trial — I want to emphasize this, at an open, public, jury trial, before a U.S. federal judge. Moreover, I am ordering the records regarding every one of the 780 detainees that have been held in this foreign dungeon over the past 20 years to be made fully public within one month.

(OUTBURSTS FROM HALL)

THE PRESIDENT: We’ll get to questions shortly.

ABC NEWS: (Faintly heard): Are you still considering returning Guantanamo Bay completely to Cuba as part of restoring diplomatic relations?

THE PRESIDENT: We will indeed be looking for a complete restoration of U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations. Everything will be on the table.

Announcement No. 4: I am ending the so-called drone assassination program. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have all asserted the right to order targeted killings of people in other countries. Basically, they say the U.S. president can have an ongoing, regularly updated list of foreigners we ought to kill — and the president can order such killings with no due process and no trial, simply based on “intelligence.” This is so obviously illegal, and so obviously counter to everything we claim to stand for, that it simply has to be repudiated.

By the way, you’re going to detect a theme in these first-day announcements, many of which are emergency steps to decrease international tensions, and to as quickly as possible de-escalate active military conflicts, none of which are in the national interests of Americans.

And thus, Announcement No. 5: I am reiterating my sincere desire for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine and an emergency peace conference. I have only made two phone calls this inauguration morning: I’ve spoken to Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenksy, who this morning has already ordered a tentative ceasefire. And I have spoken to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and he, too, has stated he will order a ceasefire. So, by the end of the day, active combat in Ukraine will — I hope — be over. (Spontaneous applause, and some disapproving muttering). We have a tentative plan for Russian, Ukrainian, American and European government representatives to meet in Istanbul in one week to negotiate next steps.

Announcement No. 6: the United States is placing a six-month moratorium, effective immediately, on all military aide to the state of Israel. The American people have been friends and allies of the Israeli people, but when your friend is driving drunk, you can’t keep handing over the car keys. We are going to pressure the Israeli government to end what looks very much like an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza, and to figure out a way to live in peace with the Palestinians.

Announcement No. 7: the United States is hereby voluntarily resuming its obligations under every nuclear disarmament treaty we have ever signed.

More than 50 years ago, upon signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, we promised to work for “general and complete” nuclear disarmament. That’s right: We have a treaty commitment to work for complete nuclear disarmament.

Over the decades since, hardliners in the U.S. government have sabotaged those efforts. Under George W. Bush in 2002 we pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, an epic mistake for our country, and under Donald Trump in 2019 we pulled out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty — in both cases because, essentially, the Pentagon wanted more freedom to put any kind of missile wherever it pleased. That sort of recklessness is now over. As a gesture of good faith towards the rest of the world, we are reassuming all of those treaty obligations. In practice, this means that we will immediately start dismantling some missile systems we have placed in Europe.

Remember, we’re talking about treaties negotiated and signed by former U.S. presidents — the ABM treaty by Richard Nixon, the INF treaty by Ronald Reagan — and ratified by a majority of U.S. senators. So, reassuming these commitments is anything but radical. I hope that this good-faith first gesture will invigorate a major international disarmament conference, which we will also be seeking.

Announcement No. 8 concerns the Australian citizen Julian Assange, a journalist who was persecuted by our government for nearly 15 years for having uncovered information about war crimes by U.S. military forces. This year, after years of persecution, Mr. Assange pled guilty to violating the U.S. Espionage Act, and he was allowed to fly home to Australia. Today, I am pardoning Mr. Assange for all of his actions involving Wikileaks and these events.

As an aside, I have also invited Mr. Assange to visit the White House, where we look forward to having him and his wife as our guests for a few days, and eventually to discussing with him the major investigation of U.S. intelligence agency practices that the White House will be launching. I will share with you today that Mr. Assange is a prominent candidate for the job of overseeing that investigation.

(OUTBURSTS FROM HALL. PRESIDENT CONTINUES.)

Announcements 9 and 10 relate to government transparency.

Announcement No. 9: I hereby order that every government document related to the assassinations, or the investigations of the assassinations, of President John F. Kennedy and also of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, be entirely declassified and made fully public. No exceptions. The Justice Department will aggressively prosecute any government official who fails to comply with this explicit presidential order, or who seeks to redact or destroy relevant documents.

Announcement No. 10 extends this same level of transparency to every government document that is more than 25 years old. The exceptions to this will be technical documentation of actual military equipment or dispositions, which will only be released if cleared by the National Security Council. Otherwise, all other documents more than 25 years old should be provided immediately upon request of any U.S. citizen.

So, that’s Day One: Ten announcements. Nuclear weapons are off of hair-trigger alert, and we will be pushing in months to come to rapidly draw down world nuclear arsenals, with a goal to have them internationally abolished. We are winding up our reckless wars abroad, from little-known covert ops to the proxy war in Ukraine to the U.S.-backed ethnic cleansing of Gaza. We’re going to work for peace in both Central Europe and the Middle East. There’s no actual reason for us to be anything other than friendly with Russia or China, and we’re going to proceed accordingly. We’re opening up all government files for a U.S. Truth and Reconciliation-style evaluation of our rogue intelligence services. And we’re ending some truly revolting and anti-American practices, including the indefinite detentions of people held in foreign dungeons without trials, the drone assassinations, and the persecution and torment of journalists.

Obviously, we have other initiatives underway, from securing our southern border — every nation has a right to control its borders! — to covering every American with Medicare. Yes, healthcare is going to be like the interstate highway system or the electric grid, something we all pay for and benefit from together, something that underpins an otherwise open and free economy. And we can afford all of this because we’re scaling back our massively wasteful military spending. So, there’s lots to discuss in the days and weeks to come. For now, I’m happy to take your questions.

(PANDEMONIUM ERUPTS IN THE HALL).