BOSTON (WBZ-AM) -- Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning, Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey criticized President Donald Trump on his recent tweets about North Korea and called for the passage of the DREAM Act.
The Senator called Trump's Tuesday night tweet regarding the "Nuclear Button" on his desk a "childlike taunt."
"The President should be trying to de-escalate, rather than escalating the tensions between our two countries," Markey said at a press conference at the JFK Federal Building in Boston. "It is absolutely irresponsible what the president is doing. It is unlike anything that any president in our history would ever have said in this situation."
Sen. Markey said Trump wasn't doing what he should be doing about tensions with the country.
"It's time for the president to really be tough on China, to really be tough on Russia on oil, on slave wages that prop up that regime," he said. "He has not yet done so. Instead, he just continues to engage in these childlike taunts that only possibly lead to accidental war being started."
He said Trump is putting the nation in danger because of the risk that President Kim Jong-Un may misinterpret what he's saying.
"We could easily slip into an accidental nuclear war," Markey said. "We could easily create a situation where there is a paranoia that is built into president Kim that could result in an accidental nuclear war between our two countries."
Markey has sponsored a bill along with Rep. Ted Lieu of California that would prevent the president from ordering a nuclear first strike.
"What Donald Trump is saying is one more reason why my bill, the law which would say that no president of the United States has the right to unilaterally start a nuclear war, [should be] passed," he said.
Markey also called for the passage of the DREAM Act to protect roughly 800,000 young immigrants, known as "DREAMers," from deportation--about 8,000 of whom live in Massachusetts.
The senator said their futures were put at risk when Trump ended DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program--a program he called "hugely successful."
"These DREAMers are students and teachers in our great Massachusetts colleges and universities," he said. "They are engineers, police officers, and business owners. They serve bravely in our military. They are making the most of the opportunities that the United States of America has always provided to immigrant communities."
He said business CEOs, academic leaders, college and university presidents, and even some Republicans in congress are speaking up in support of the DREAM Act.
"These are real Americans with real futures that are more important than President Trump's ineffective and mean-spirited fantasy of building a wall across our entire southern border," he said. "We cannot allow Donald Trump and his hateful and divisive agenda to undermine who we are here in Massachusetts or who we are here in the United States of America."