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Rush Transcript: Trump's full speech to the UN General Assembly bit.ly/2xbVerG
Reading the transcript and knowing that Trump was reading off a teleprompter, this is actually more conventional than we think. 
It's not "fire and fury." @NarangVipin and I explained how the US *usually* threatens #NorthKorea conditionally. warontherocks.com/2017/08/war-of…
The use of "totally destroy," IMO, is roughly analogous to what US officials mean w/ "effective and overwhelming" retaliation.
Words still matter & this was not the right choice for the General Assembly. But this is still not quite where we were with "fire and fury."
FWIW, here's Mattis this August, on the 72nd anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing, threatening the "destruction" of North Korea's people.
The key difference here is between threats vs. behaviors appearing left of the conditional; that matters for how DPRK will read these words.
