Trump's twelfth week in office has come with a storm of media criticism and controversy. The issues range from his Press Secretary stating falsehoods about Adolf Hitler and his treatment of German Jews during the Holocaust, to rising tensions between the US and North Korea, to the continuing investigations into and allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The United States also dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb in Afghanistan on Thursday, sparking arguments on whether or not such military force was warranted.
Arguably the most incendiary domestic event of the week was Sean Spicer's comments regarding the chemical attack launched by Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Spicer stated that Assad was comparatively worse than Hitler, because Hitler did not use chemical weapons against "his own people." This statement carries a dangerous assumption: that German Jews gassed during the Holocaust were not in fact German citizens (which they were). Spicer's words play into a longstanding anti-Semitic viewpoint that Jewish peoples are eternal foreigners and thus never true members of their respective nations. When a reporter attempted to give Spicer an attempt to recover, the latter only made matters worse by referring to concentration camps as "Holocaust centers" and insisting that Hitler did not strike against "innocent" victims. Spicer has since apologized repeatedly, but the damage has been done-there are renewed and widespread calls for the Press Secretary's removal in response to these statements.
In other news, investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election continue unabated. On Tuesday night, the Washington Post reported that the FBI had received a court order last summer to investigate Carter Page, a Trump adviser. Page was tapped for investigation because the FBI believed that he was acting as a Russian agent. In addition, Paul Manafort (Trump's former campaign chairman) may soon register as a foreign agent due to his prior political work in Ukraine. These reports add to the already growing body of evidence that Russia was involved in the Trump presidential campaign.
On the international front, tensions between the United States and North Korea are on the rise. Upon leaving office, former President Barrack Obama advised Trump to give particular notice to North Korea, as its leader Kim Jong Un has greatly accelerated the nuclear missile program started by his father. Kim appears to be attempting to secure a nuclear warhead onto an intercontinental ballistic missile (in an attempt to preserve the security of his regime). Upon entering office, Trump posted a number of tweets that demanded that China take more measures to curtail North Korea's actions. The following March, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson threatened that the US would seriously consider a preemptive attack if Pyongyang continued to advance its nuclear program, stating that, "the policy of strategic patience has ended." Despite China's opposition, The United States military has intensified its plans to deploy the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense antimissile system in South Korea. It has also moved an aircraft carrier towards North Korean waters. China, now in the middle of these rising tensions, sees itself as between two unpredictable world leaders with nuclear capabilities: Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. In response to the Trump administration's aggression, China has begun to act markedly less friendly towards Pyongyang, raising questions about the future of the longstanding alliance between the two nations.