If you need one reason to be scared of Donald Trump, this is it

The Trump story has gone from mild diversion, to funny joke, to an annoyance, to an outrage, and now right through to a genuine threat. Could this man actually become American President?

At the very least, he now looks like a shoe-in to be the Republican nominee, with rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich reported to be on the verge of teaming up in a last-ditch attempt to stop what seems to be inevitable.

And, while Hillary Clinton - assuming she sees off the spirited challenge of rival Bernie Sanders - would be expected to triumph in the election, absolutely no one can predict what Trump might achieve once things get really nasty. Come November, President Trump could be sworn in on the steps of the Capitol Building, so we'd better start preparing for it.

If the wall-building, the racism, the abortion comments and all the rest weren't scary enough, you can add one more reason to the list.

Bobby Knight, a former coach of the Indiana Hoosiers basketball team, recently endorsed Trump at an event in Evansville, Indiana crowd, comparing him to Harry Truman, the President who led the US in the final stage of the Second World War, saying that he was in no doubt that he would "have the guts" to drop an atomic bomb, as Truman did on Japan in 1945.

Knight said, "I tell you who they said wasn't presidential - I don't even know what the hell presidential means - but they told him that he wasn't presidential. And that guy they told, all these people that wanted to say 'you're not presidential' - that guy was Harry Truman. And Harry Truman, with what he did in dropping - in having the guts to drop the bomb in 1944 - saved billions of American lives. And that what's Harry Truman did, and he became one of the three great Presidents of the United States and here's a man who would do the same thing because he's gonna become one of the four great Presidents of the United States."

However, an endorsement from Knight is not without its own drawbacks. The coach was infamously fired from his position after allegations of physical assault, and also came under fire after comparing the handling of stress and rape during an NBC News interview, saying, ''I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”

Well, they say "You can judge a man by the company he keeps". So you can judge for yourselves.

Trump this week himself refused to rule out using nuclear weapons against ISIS.

Speaking on NBC's Today program, he said, “I don’t want to rule out anything. I will be the last to use nuclear weapons. It’s a horror to use nuclear weapons. The power of weaponry today is the single greatest problem that our world has, and it’s not global warming like our president said. It’s the power of weapons, in particular nuclear.”

He went on, “I will be the last to use it. I will not be a happy trigger like some people might be. I will be the last. But I will never, ever rule it out... If I get elected president, I don’t want ISIS to know what I’m going to be doing."

He also outlined a borderline-incoherent nuclear deterrence strategy in an interview on Fox News:

Here's the transcript of that baffling statement:

Anyone? No?

God help us all.

(Image: Rex)