Read CNN reports below,
With his jaw set and his arms crossed, Donald Trump delivered the most incendiary public threat by an American president in many decades.
Trump, instantly escalating a nuclear showdown with North Korea, warned that if the isolated state did not quit making its own threats, it would face "fire and fury like the world has never seen."
From political, diplomatic, and historical perspectives, Trump's threat, delivered from his golf club in New Jersey, was an extraordinary moment and shattered years of national security conventions in apparently threatening to use nuclear weapons in response to an adversary's rhetoric -- rather than an existential threat to US security.
It might have also walked the United States closer to a full on showdown with North Korea, and placed his own personal reputation on the line in a test of wills with Kim Jong Un.
"He has been very threatening beyond a normal state. They will be met with fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before," said Trump in remarks that seemed more typical of the blasts of rhetoric issued by the North Korean news agency KCNA rather than of a US president.
By accident or design, Trump established a red line -- an apparent contravention of efforts by his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis to tone down tensions with Pyongyang.
By making such an explicit threat to North Korea, on camera, the President also invested his own personal prestige into the center of the crisis. The next time Kim makes some kind of threat to the US or its allies, Trump will immediately come under pressure to make North Korea pay a price -- or risk having his authority exposed as hollow.
The comments also came at a time when the President is undergoing a crisis of the kind of credibility commanders-in-chief need during a major national security crisis.
A CNN poll Tuesday said that nearly three-quarters of Americans did not trust what is coming out of the White House. And a CBS News poll released Tuesday showed that 61% of Americans were uneasy about Trump's ability to handle the situation with North Korea.
"Donald Trump may put himself in a box because he is promising action that he might actually be unwilling to deliver on," said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. "So he should be careful what he threatens because he may, for the sake of US credibility, have to act on his threats. That's why presidents are so careful not to bluff. The other side can call your bluff."
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