Everything and nothing that Donald Trump says should be taken seriously. He has proved both that he does what he says he will do – and that he always backs down. Let us hope that when he is making threats of annihilation, he’s not fingering the nuclear button but just having a tantrum.

Any other world leader with access to Doomsday weapons would cause global horror. The US president has said he could “totally destroy” North Korea, “wipe out” Afghanistan, threaten that “a whole civilization will die tonight” in Iran and that the country would be “blown off the face of the earth” if it targets the US military in the region.

The US president’s threats against Iran, which are more directly apocalyptic than any made by Iran’s president or supreme leaders against either America or Israel, have been condemned by some of Trump’s critics.

But his repeated flirtation with the idea of using weapons of mass destruction has put him in a category that is arguably more sinister than that of our established bogeyman dictators.

Recently, Trump has used more inflammatory language than North Korea’s Kim Jong Un or Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Crucially, Trump rules over a nation that still has a democratic constitution. The greatest test so far of how much of America’s democracy has been stripped of its branches will be in the midterm elections in November.

Trump’s threats against North Korea go back to 2017, during his first term in office. His words have been personal, while Kim has avoided saying anything directly. Kim’s officials have said that Japan could be “sunk into the sea” and that North Korea could “destroy the US” in pre-emptive nuclear strikes.

Similarly, Putin has moved some nuclear-capable forces closer to Ukraine and used non-specific threats that he is “not bluffing” when he said that Russia could use “all the means at our disposal” to see off an escalation in military support to Ukraine.

Russia has about 5,500 nuclear weapons. The US has about 5,000. North Korea has only around 40 or 50 and is still developing its long-range missile capabilities.

But in using the kind of language that he likes to display in person and on social media, Trump is removing the US from the top of the list of mature nuclear powers, along with France and the UK, and enthusiastically settling into the company of rogue nations.

Read More: Trump’s threat to ‘blow away’ Iran shows how few options he really has