


This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. No one wants me to push that button, so we’ll just keep it over here. “If Trump noticed someone glancing at the box - and sometimes completely unprompted - he would pick it up and move it farther away from himself,” Sims writes.Īccording to Sims, Trump would say, “Don’t worry about that. “ What happens if he presses that red button? I’m sure many a first-time visitor wondered to themselves,” Sims writes in Team of Vipers, released this week, which gives a critical look at the 2016 campaign and the chaos of the Trump White House.

President Donald Trump once threatened Kim Jong-un with nuclear war by declaring that he had a “much bigger & more powerful” button than the North Korean leader.Īccording to a former White House staffer, this same image of nuclear deployment is what the president wanted associates to think of when he pressed a red button on his desk in the Oval Office.Ĭliff Sims - who served on the communications team as a special assistant to Trump until 2018 after working on Trump’s presidential campaign - says he remembers meetings in the Oval Office where attendees couldn’t help but stare at the small wooden box, featuring the presidential seal and a red button on the president’s Resolute desk.
