What did Donald Trump do today?
He got ten nuclear-capable missiles launched symbolically at him by the dictator he "fell in love" with.
For reasons that are not yet clear, Trump has recently been trying to reignite his charm offensive with North Korea. Earlier this week, he condemned South Korea for holding joint military exercises with the United States he'd already agreed to, and yesterday he declared that North Korea "would be fine" thanks to the 57 nuclear weapons they possessed. (The exact number of weapons that US intelligence had determined North Korea to possess has never been revealed before, and would have been an extremely sensitive secret before Trump blurted it out.)
It hasn't gone unnoticed that by cozying up to the Kim Jong-un regime, a rogue state that is a much greater international pariah that a stable Iran would be, Trump is making the strongest possible case for Iran to acquire a nuclear deterrent like North Korea's. Trump said he was angry with South Korea's president for not joining in his ill-fated war with Iran, which is supposedly about preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear deterrent. But he hasn't said why he doesn't seem to mind that North Korea has supplied Iran with weapons, and is continuing to prop up the Russian attacks on Ukraine.
Today, Trump got his reward: North Korea launched ten missiles in a "test" that was an unsubtle rebuke of Trump. Kim Yo-jong, who is Kim Jong-un's sister and chief spokesperson, blasted Trump's attempts to ingratiate himself as too little and too late. She also called Trump a liar for claiming that there was another meeting planned with Kim Jong-un.
Trump's own history suggests that she is correct. He routinely insists that world leaders are desperate to talk with him even as those governments deny it. In some cases he may actually believe it, but he's also been caught trying to engineer scenarios that make him look like the one who is being courted when it's really the opposite. For example, last year his staff pleaded with China's president Xi Jinping to "ask" to talk to Trump about the tariffs he'd just imposed, so that Trump could magnanimously "grant" the request and convey strength. (Inevitably, China simply announced what Trump was doing.)
Trump seems to genuinely believe that Kim Jong-un, who has committed some of the most horrific crimes against humanity in the last century, is truly his friend and can be negotiated with on friendly terms. Kim, who has ruled since 2011, has
- ordered the murder of at least seven members of his own government, and in some cases, their families
- detained eleven American citizens to use as bargaining chips for a total of 3,941 days, in conditions that led to at least one death
- jailed approximately 120,000 of his own citizens for their political beliefs in prisons where prisoners are
- punitively raped
- starved
- tortured, sometimes to death
- forced approximately 2,640,000 of his own citizens to work under conditions of slavery in "re-education camps"
- sold slave labor outside the country to fund its government
- forced women to have abortions against their will
- conducted at least 26 long-range missile tests, including 16 during Trump's term in office, the most recent of which could likely strike the entire continental United States
- successfully completed testing of several working nuclear weapon designs, and stockpiled about 60 weapons
- got caught planning to hide those weapons while pretending to go along with the disarmament plan Trump believes to exist since his first summit
- got caught continuing to expand and develop the missile program, immediately after pledging not to at the previous Trump-Kim summit
- ransomed the remains of American soldiers killed or captured in the Korean War
- governed a country where, outside of a tiny elite class, citizens are frequently
- malnourished
- suffering from infection by parasitic worms
- constantly surveilled
- prohibited from contacting or learning about the outside world
- Threatened the United States with a nuclear attack if sanctions weren't dropped
- called the United States "cancerous" and "gangster-like"
Why does this matter?
- There is naïve, and then there is a sitting President of the United States thinking that Kim Jong-un likes him and will do him favors.
- It's a problem for the United States if nobody, friend or foe, has any reason to believe anything its president says.
- If Donald Trump understood what had just happened, he'd be humiliated.