Why can’t we use nuclear weapons against bedbugs?

Have you heard the one about the lawbreaker who got pardoned by President Trump?

It’s so funny it’s criminal.

As The Post’s Nick Miroff and Josh Dawsey report, Trump has told his subordinates to seize private land and disregard environmental rules as they build a border wall, offering to pardon them for breaking the law. The White House response? Trump is joking.

Hahahahahahaha. My sides are totally splitting.

That was almost as funny as the time when — stop me if you’ve heard this one — Trump told Russia to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails. “He was joking,” the White House said.

LOL! ROFLMAO!

So deadpan was Trump’s humor then that the Russians didn’t get the joke; they began acting on Trump’s request within hours, special counsel Robert Mueller found. Now that’s funny.

And who can forget the hilarious time when Trump told law enforcement officers that they should feel free to rough up the people they arrest?

The incorrigible cutup! Even the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration was fooled by the president’s wickedly subtle humor. He issued a statement warning agents not to follow the president’s advice.

Trump’s emergence as a comedic genius is a recent development. Back during the campaign, Trump said he didn’t joke around: “Mexico is going to pay for the wall — believe me,” he said. “Politicians think we’re joking. We don’t joke. This is a movement, and movements don’t joke.”

That made sense, because here’s the funny thing: Trump isn’t very funny. His humor is cutting and coarse, rarely lighthearted. His unsmiling supporters took him “seriously but not literally.”

But apparently we shouldn’t take him seriously, either — because he and his aides have recast a series of ominous statements as jokes that the rest of us just didn’t get:

● Asking then-FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

● Telling a campaign crowd to take a loyalty pledge to him.

● Threatening to fire then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price.

● Saying “I love WikiLeaks” when it released stolen Democratic emails.

● Saying Democrats who didn’t applaud his State of the Union address were “TREASONOUS.”

● Calling himself the “Chosen One,” among other messianic claims.

● Wishing he were “president for life” or serving another “10 or 14 years.”

● Thanking Russian President Vladimir Putin for expelling U.S. diplomats.

Trump is so dry that even he has difficulty determining when he’s joking. When he says his White House runs well, it’s said “jokingly, but meaning it.” His claim that former president Barack Obama founded the Islamic State is “sarcastic but not that sarcastic.”

Trump’s “joking,” therefore, is less ha-ha funny than his funny little way of blunting the damage when he says something particularly outrageous or is caught in a lie.

So far, Trump denies it, but with such frequent, frantic and doth-protest-too-much denials (“The media in our Country is totally out of control!” he tweeted Tuesday night) that the report is almost certainly true.

In public and in private, Trump has long raised questions about the point of stockpiling nuclear weapons if you never use them. The real question is why he didn’t come out with a hurricane-nuking plan earlier. It fits perfectly with his strategic thinking in its thorough lack of regard for consequences or collateral damage.

Trump isn’t fooling anyone, so he might as well take ownership of the nukes-you-can-use position. There are many ways to get more bang for the buck from our nuclear arsenal. All it takes is some out-of-the-silo thinking by the commander in chief.

After dropping one in the eye of Hurricane Dorian, he could use another one to deforest the Amazon, thereby eliminating the threat of future forest fires. A string of nuclear explosions along the southern border would prove a more effective deterrent than a wall. Nuclear fallout would swiftly eliminate the alleged bedbug infestation at Trump’s Doral club in Florida. Nuking Greenland would likely bring down the purchase price.

There’s hardly a problem Trump couldn’t eliminate with a controlled nuclear detonation. He could nuke his tax returns, nuke the Fed, nuke Obamacare, nuke the federal debt, nuke 40 pounds of body fat, nuke rare steaks, nuke opioid stockpiles, nuke measles outbreaks, nuke Democratic precincts and nuke the leech with three jaws and 59 teeth just discovered in Washington.

In the unlikely event anything were to go awry, Trump has a well-tested excuse for pressing the button: I was just joking.

Congressman King Addresses the Westside Conservative Club (Transcript included. See it for yourself)

Here is the source document for the comments Congressman King recently made regarding his “no exceptions” pro-life position.

View the footage for yourselves to see what King actually said.

Here’s a hint: King’s remarks were not accurately portrayed by the Des Moines Register or The Associated Press. In fact, each entity has subsequently issued corrections for their coverage of King’s speech.

Here is a transcript of King’s remarks that provides accuracy and context left out of much of the media coverage.

“We moved this along to 174 co-sponsors. I had solid promises that we would get a mark-up in Judiciary Committee. I kept getting messages to accept an amendment for exceptions for rape and incest.

“I’ve got 174 people who say they don’t want exceptions for rape and incest because they understand it is not the baby’s fault, to abort the baby, because of the sin of the father, and maybe sometimes the sin of the mother too, and so I refused to do that. I just kept pushing the pressure up. We had the votes in the judiciary committee to peel off every amendment and put that bill on the floor, and pass it on the floor. And put the marker down that exceptions are not going to be part of the dialogue any further because this is about the sanctity of human life.

And so I refused to do that and down to the last couple days of our lame duck session, that order came back out of leadership – ‘no mark-up, no floor action!’ Boom. And so, all right, I held the ground on principle. Maybe we could have gotten that to the floor if I compromised, it wasn’t going to move through the Senate anyway, but we still stand on these principles of life.

Since then, I started to think. We know the reasons why we don’t want the exceptions, for the most of us, for rape and incest – because it is not the baby’s fault. And I started to wonder about this, what if it was OK and what if we went back through all of our family trees and just pulled those people out who were products of rape and incest, would there be any population of the world left if we did that? Considering all of the wars, all of the rape and pillage that has taken place, whatever happened with culture after society, I know I can’t certify that I’m not part of a product of that.

And I would like to think that every one of the lives of us are as precious as any other life, and that is our measure. Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all things are weighed. Human life, not a qualifier there, it’s not about whether you are one day after conception or one day after birth or one day before your 100th birthday, all life has equal value according to the law and equal value according to God.”

Foreign Leaders Have Realized Trump Is a Pushover

The president’s reported disclosure of classified information to Russia is only the latest example of the self-proclaimed great negotiator conceding to officials from overseas everything they want.

Politico’s Susan Glasser confirmed, the Russians had been pressing hard for an in-person meeting with Trump, “a man who is now known for starkly reversing his positions if exposed to in-person pleasantries.”

.. As it happened, the meeting with Xi was something of a love-fest. Trump and his spokesman have boasted since about the very good relationship they created with China’s leader, and hailed their friendship. If Trump was pleased with the outcome, Xi must have been ecstatic. The Chinese president emerged from the meeting with warm praise from Trump; a concession from the U.S. president that China was not manipulating its currency; and conciliatory statements about China’s ability to twist the arm of North Korea, its wild-eyed, nuclear-armed neighbor.

Trump explained the last of these flip-flops in an interview with The Wall Street Journal:

He then went into the history of China and Korea. Not North Korea, Korea. And you know, you’re talking about thousands of years … and many wars. And Korea actually used to be a part of China. And after listening for 10 minutes I realized that not—it’s not so easy. You know I felt pretty strongly that they have—that they had a tremendous power over China. I actually do think they do have an economic power, and they have certainly a border power to an extent, but they also—a lot of goods come in. But it’s not what you would think.

The explanation was remarkable not only for Trump’s frank admission that he knew little about the background of the Korean Peninsula, but for his equally frank admission that the leader of a foreign country—and not just any foreign country, but a major American rival that Trump had repeatedly savaged rhetorically—could reverse his understanding of a key issue with just 10 minutes of persuasion.

The explanation was remarkable not only for Trump’s frank admission that he knew little about the background of the Korean Peninsula, but for his equally frank admission that the leader of a foreign country—and not just any foreign country, but a major American rival that Trump had repeatedly savaged rhetorically—could reverse his understanding of a key issue with just 10 minutes of persuasion.

It is no wonder that the Russians were eager to get in a room with Trump, but Russia and China were not the only foreign countries to recognize how easily swayed Trump could be.

The pattern began even before he was inaugurated, with a December phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. Not only was the conversation a major breach of protocol, Trump seemed to be flirting with abandoning American recognition that Beijing considers Taiwan a part of a unified China. He was eventually talked down from this by advisers—and his vacillation is one reason Xi was so eager to meet—but his impressionability had been established.

Another example came in a bizarre 24 hours of kabuki geopolitical theater in late April. With Trump reeling from a series of legislative and judicial defeats, White House officials told reporters the president was close to signing an executive order announcing that the U.S. would pull out of NAFTA. That evening, the leaders of Canada and Mexico both called Trump. As the president told it, they begged him to reconsider, and to renegotiate the terms of the deal instead. Trump presented this as a triumph: He’d gotten them to agree to renegotiation. Savvier observers saw a different picture: Trump’s threats were empty and his bluster easily dispelled. After issuing an intemperate threat, Trump had to be talked down by foreign leaders, whose only “concession” was agreeing to a renegotiation they had both long-since agreed to.

Even as Trump seems to get rolled by adversaries, his relationships with allies have been troubled. While Canada and Mexico are both close friends, the U.S. has notably vexed relationships with Russia, China, and Taiwan. Trump had a warm visit with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, but a visit from German Chancellor Angela Merkel was downright icy, marred by an ill-considered joke from Trump as well as his conspiracy-mongering about Barack Obama. Trump even managed to set off a feud in a phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, though they smoothed things over during a recent visit by Turnbull to the U.S.