Trump faces pair of double-barreled crises at home and abroad
WASHINGTON - As a candidate, Donald Trump boasted of his lack of government experience and argued his business background qualified him to handle a president's most august responsibility - handling the nuclear arsenal.
On Sunday, hours after North Korea claimed it had tested its first hydrogen bomb, far more powerful than its previous nuclear tests, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis emerged from a meeting that Trump had just held with his top national security advisers, and raised the specter of nuclear war.
Standing in the White House driveway with Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mattis warned Pyongyang that aggression against the United States or its allies would trigger a unified world response and what he termed the "total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea."
"Any threat to the United States or
