I wasn’t initially planning to write today, but boy oh boy there’s some serious news breaking right now. John Bolton, the former (recess appointed & never Senate confirmed) Ambassador to the UN under President George W. Bush, was just named as National Security Adviser to replace General HR McMaster. This is an incredibly awful decision by the President, perhaps his worst to date. It’s definitely his worst hire, bar none.

As poor as the choices of Ben Carson to direct HUD, Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, and Jared Kushner as literally anything were, none left us with the distinct possibility (an in my opinion, probability) that we would enter a new war. John Bolton’s hiring does exactly that. He has written and spoken consistently about his thoughts of going to war with Iran as well as North Korea. He claimed in the New York Times in 2015 that “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” This was a man so universally loathed as UN Ambassador that he couldn’t even get Senate confirmation from a heavily Republican body back in the mid-2000s. His work on justifying the Iraq War, long after we knew it was a mistake, is the stuff of infamy.

Trump not only just hired a terrible policy person, but also one who is positively gung-ho about getting us involved in an inevitably disastrous armed conflict in Iran or North Korea. If we think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were (are) bad, these new wars would be about 100 times worse; Iran and North Korea are both states with extremely large militaries, and both either have or could easily attain nuclear weapons. We would be internationally isolated if we decide to go to war with either of these despicable regimes, as there are non-military paths that could help us gain the same outcome.

In my estimation, this one hiring decision could lead us into our largest war since at least Vietnam, all within the next year. Which is why this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst single decision President Trump has made thus far.