[S]ince their historic first meeting in Singapore last June, the two leaders have adopted a strategy of playing to each other’s ego with gushing and gratuitous adoration in pursuit of their aims.
(The Washington Post, February 25, 2019)
They actually take pains to show how much they’re in love. But, after Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga showed what that looks like at the Oscars on Sunday, nobody’s buying what Trump and Kim are selling:
Trust me, despite all the media hoopla, this cartoon more accurately depicts the dangerous liaison at the heart of this week’s Trump-Kim Summit II in Hanoi, Vietnam:
More to the point, here is why I knew it would prove every bit the Potemkin affair their first summit was in Singapore.
At a rally in West Virginia on Saturday night, Trump announced that, while exchanging letters and holding their summit, he and Kim Jong Un ‘fell in love’ …
Nothing betrays [the delusional, existential recklessness Trump’s protestation of love reflects] quite like North Korea’s foreign minister declaring mere hours before that rally that, no matter how much he strokes Trump’s ego, Kim will never go all the way. …
In other words, Trump has a greater chance of getting Mexico to pay for that wall than he has of getting North Korea to even think about giving up its nukes.
(“Trump Loves Kim. Kim Loves Nukes. And Never the Twain Shall Greet,” The iPINIONS Journal, October 1, 2018)
Sure enough:
President Trump and Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, abruptly ended their second summit meeting on Thursday after talks collapsed with the two leaders failing to agree on any steps toward nuclear disarmament or measures to ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula. …
The premature end to the negotiations leaves the unusual rapprochement between the United States and North Korea that has unfolded for most of a year at a deadlock, with the North retaining both its nuclear arsenal and facilities believed to be producing additional fissile material for warheads.
(The New York Times, February 28, 2019)
But it’s noteworthy that, while Trump flew off to take a cold shower back in America, Kim was smoking a cigarette and planning sightseeing tours around Vietnam.
So who do you think is zooming who in their “brokeback” bromance…? Hint: One of them has now flown halfway across the world twice just to be catfished.
Again, even I knew this summit was going to blow up in Trump’s face. Therefore, you might wonder why this master of The Art of the Deal had no clue. But the greater wonder might be why commentators (conservatives and liberals alike) are hailing him for “walking away from a bad deal.”
Sadly, the latter merely reflects Trump’s Orwellian dumbing down of political debate – not just in America but around the world. These, after all, are the same commentators who bought into his self-aggrandizing folly of demanding praise for lowering nuclear tensions on the Korean Peninsula, which he himself was responsible for raising in the first place. Remember “fire and fury?”
Now they’re buying into his self-aggrandizing folly of demanding praise for walking away from this deal, which no president with half a brain would have flown halfway across the world to (try to) “consummate” in the first place.
Frankly, it is cringe inducing to watch Kim jerking Trump around so much. Most notably, he got this chump to
- forego joint US-South Korean military exercises; and
- add national insult to the Warmbier family’s pain by ignoring US intelligence agencies (again) and asserting that he believes Kim’s line about knowing nothing of the infamous torture of Otto Warmbier hook, line, and sinker.
And all Trump can say is that he got Kim to
- wink while promising to stop testing nukes that no longer need testing (Reports are that Kim is actually increasing his arsenal. He figures that, as long as he continues stroking Trump’s ego, Trump won’t care how many nukes he develops); and
- nod while agreeing to stop calling Trump a dotard … if Trump stops calling him Rocket Man.
It’s troubling enough that a president of the United States would fawn the way Trump does over a tin-pot dictator. But the assbackwardness of this tail wagging the dog does not fully capture the perversity and ramifications of Trump’s ignominy.
Finally, apropos of brain, his fixer Michael Cohen testified yesterday that Trump ordered him to threaten the heads of every school Trump attended with dire consequences if they ever released his transcripts. This, from the “con man” who insisted that the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency depended on him showing not just his birth certificate but his school transcripts to boot.
That trademark hypocrisy aside, Trump clearly fears the public having documentary evidence that shows what is so plain to see, namely, that he’s a friggin’ moron.
[Note: It is practically impossible to write about Trump without denouncing him as an international laughingstock. But, whenever I do, I feel obliged to concede that the joke is on us because he’s the president of the United States and leader of the free world.]
Related commentaries:
Trump loves Kim…
the Oscars…
Singapore…
fire and fury…
Michael Cohen testifies…
Trump’s birther nonsense…
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