Maxine Waters: If North Korea Nukes Us, Trump Will Get Us Into A War-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters said, “My fear is if North Korea nukes us, Trump gonna get us into a war,” in response to nuclear tensions between the U.S. and North Korea in August 2017.
The Truth:
There’s no record of Maxine Waters ever voicing concern that a North Korean nuclear strike would lead to President Trump taking America to war.
That rumor surfaced in August 2017 with a post at a Facebook page called Hostility Against Tyranny. The page often targets Democrats, liberals, news media and President Trump’s critics with satirical memes, videos and posts meant to expose their hypocrisy, or to poke fun of their logic.
In this case, Hostility Against Tyranny posted a meme that showed a scene of nuclear war, a picture of Maxine Waters’ head, and the quote, “My fear is if North Korea nukes us, Trump gonna get us into a war.”
Taken at face value, the post implies that Maxine Waters is more concerned about President Trump taking the country to war than North Korea carrying out a nuclear attack on the homeland. But Waters didn’t say that. The post is a satirical take on Waters’ call for America to use diplomacy to defuse North Korea’s nuclear threat in mid-August 2017.
Maxine Waters delivered the remarks during an encounter with TMZ on August 10, 2017. A TMZ reporter approached Waters, said the U.S. was on the verge of nuclear war, and asked her for her thoughts. Waters responded by calling for the State Department to fill vacant positions so that it could engage in diplomacy to defuse the situation:
“Here are my thoughts: State Department must be staffed up to deal in diplomacy. We can not afford to be in a war. And I want us to be very careful, very alert to what is happening, and to avoid war. I think we can do this with some diplomacy. But we’ve got to have (Secretary of State Rex Tillerson) get those positions filled for deputy, for assistant, so we can engage with North Korea. I believe that North Korea is a threat to the United States. But there’s some things that they want from us and we have to find out whether or not we can work with them on what they’re asking for. So this is something we should be very concerned about. But this not the time to be bluffing, and threatening. This is the time for diplomacy.”
In the end, Maxine Waters didn’t say that she feared a North Korean nuclear strike would lead President Trump to take America to war. She called for diplomacy to address the threat, and a satirical take on her remarks was later mistaken for reality.