Amid escalating tensions with both North Korea and Iran, President Donald Trump's advisers hesitated to give him military options fearing the President might accidentally take the US to war and deliberately informed their counterparts in both countries that they did not know what the President would do next, multiple former administration officials tell me.
These accounts are contained in my upcoming book, "The Madman Theory: Trump Takes on the World," which will be published August 11 by Harper Collins.
Trump's relationship with Kim Jong Un has blown hot and cold throughout his presidency but in 2017 as the President dubbed Kim "little rocket man" and the North Korean dictator responded by calling Trump a "dotard," there was a very real fear amongst senior members of the administration that the war of words might culminate in the President launching military action against Pyongyang.
"We used to only think of Kim Jong Un as unpredictable. Now we had Trump as unpredictable," Joseph Yun, who served as President Trump's special representative for North Korea policy until 2018, told me. "And I would communicate that."