Veteran British journalist and broadcaster Adam Boulton said there is a very real concern that President Donald Trump is "so incompetent and so misguided and so selfish" that he might bumble his way into a third world war before he leaves office, with roughly two years still remaining in Trump's term.

Boulton is a longtime British journalist, known for his time as political editor and editor-at-large at Sky News as well as a series of presenter roles over the years. He now makes regular presenter appearances for Times Radio, the news and speech radio station of The Times and Sunday Times in the United Kingdom. In one of his latest broadcasts (video), he voiced personal concern about the damage Trump could do between a bruising loss in the midterms — the halfway-point elections in which all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate are on the ballot — and his last day in the White House, suggesting that the president's overwhelming incompetence could very well bring about a "hot third world war."

Boulton laid out a chain of blame running from the war with Iran to the war in Ukraine, framing his remarks around the prospect of the midterm elections going against the Republicans.

"I just wonder, you know, we've been talking about the midterms and anticipation that they're going to go against the Republicans," Boulton said. "I just wonder how much damage Donald Trump can do before we see the back of him. You know, this whole business of the war against Iran, which he and Israel kicked off, is now the cause for higher fuel prices. Whatever he says, his response to higher fuel prices is to somehow try and blame the Ukrainians and support the Russians. And this is obviously going to inflame the situation in Europe."

He added: "And then we got all the sidelines, like televising executions and just lowering the whole fabric of political discussion. And you know, I really do worry that Trump is so incompetent and so misguided and so selfish that, you know, he could plunge us into a hot third world war before we see the back of him."

Later in the broadcast, Boulton also wondered which side the United Kingdom would be fighting on if a third world war were to come about soon, in a tone that suggested he was not certain it would be alongside the United States.

"One thing we can expect is the president to sign a whole lot of pardons in the time that he has," host John Pienaar added. "And also, he's still in some ways unconstrained when it comes to the conduct of foreign policy, and we've seen how the war in Ukraine has been waged."

Pienaar, a veteran political journalist who served as the BBC's deputy political editor before joining Times Radio, was pointing to a structural feature of US government: midterm results do not transfer the president's foreign policy authority. The president serves as commander-in-chief and directs diplomacy regardless of which party controls Congress, while Congress holds separate levers such as funding and declarations of war.

Source: Alternet