America, This Is Your President
Donald Trump, as many have pointed out, is a megalomaniac and a narcissist. To deny this evaluation at this point is merely to reject the labels of modern psychology, which is fine with me. But to reject the modern labeling is not to deny the underlying facts: Trump is a man intellectually crippled by self-importance and morally distorted by vanity.
Here is a video of the President of the United States, the figurehead of freedom in the modern world, the head of state of civilization’s only realistic hope for the defense of liberty against the suffocating global ooze of tyrannical progressivism, speaking with Fox News interviewer Bret Baier about Kim Jong-un, the dictator of a country often identified as the most repressive and morally depraved nation on Earth at this time.
Watch the video in its entirety. Do not rely on summaries or clipped quotes, including my own. However painful it may be for you, if you care about the fate of civilization, you do not have the luxury of evading the truth about the current president. Take fourteen minutes to find out once and for all who he really is, in his heart, as he speaks spontaneously and confidently at what is obviously a moment of extreme personal satisfaction:
On Kim Jong-un, whom Trump had already praised heavily in a previous interview with Sean Hannity:
When I met him today, we have a — a very good relationship, I feel. I feel it’s good. You know, we know when we have chemistry, you know it as well as anybody and you understand what I mean.
Can you imagine ever saying of your meeting with a man who is what Kim Jong-un is, “We have a very good relationship,” or “We have chemistry”?
On his intention to remove U.S. forces from Korea, including the halting of joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which Trump announced immediately after his meeting with Kim, without consulting the South Korean government, and which he justified on the grounds that these war games are “very provocative” and “inappropriate” under current circumstances:
I would love to get the (U.S.) military out as soon as we can, because it costs a lot of money, a lot of money for us. We don’t get paid fully for that military, which, you know, I’ll be talking to South Korea about — but, we have thirty-two thousand soldiers in South Korea. I’d like to get ’em home, I would like to, but it is not on the table right now.
Removing U.S. troops from the Korean Peninsula is “not on the table right now.” Right — that’s why he repeatedly mentioned his commitment to it immediately after making his “deal” with Kim, and why here he even directly criticizes South Korea in connection with it, in that unique way Trump has of slamming allies at the very moment he is standing up for thugs, as he did at the G-7 meeting. In other words, he put the U.S. drawdown on the table with his unnecessary public statements about getting U.S. troops out of the region “as soon as we can,” thus handing North Korea and China exactly the gift they have been asking for all along.
Speaking of which, here is the nominal leader of the free world answering the question as to whether China is getting exactly what it wants from Trump’s complete capitulation to Kim:
No, I think China would really like to see no nuclear weapons, if you want to know the truth. Whether you’re semi-friendly with a nation or not, when they have nuclear weapons and you’re that close, it can’t be a positive feeling, just can’t be.
Trump’s initial “No” would be a “Yes,” for those of us who speak English — that is, yes this denuclearization agreement is what China wanted. As for Trump’s explanation of China’s wishes, regarding the negative “feeling” of a nation next to an ally with nuclear weapons, I guess that means Canada and Mexico would be justified in demanding that the U.S. denuclearize.
Then, of course, there is the absurdity of Trump’s continued assumption that China’s motives can be understood at face value: they are uncomfortable about nuclear weapons, they want peace on the Korean Peninsula, they are resisting Trump because they are afraid of his trade restrictions, and so on. To put this as generously as possible, these interpretations make Trump look like the dumbest man who ever lived. (I told you I would try to be generous, and I did, I really did.)
As for China’s President Xi Jinping:
I have a very good relationship with President Xi of China — he’s, you know, an incredible guy! Just, you know, essentially president for life; that’s pretty good.
China has officially begun the process of returning to full-out totalitarian communist rule — always the long-term plan — and Trump thinks this is “pretty good,” and that the man instituting this regression to Maoist-era oppression is “an incredible guy.”
Answering a question about his glowing praise of Kim Jong-un before and after his summit, in light of the fact that, as the interviewer emphatically notes, “he is a killer,” Trump offers this beauty:
He’s a tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country — a tough country, tough people — and you take it over from your father — I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have, if you can do that at twenty-seven years old, I mean that’s one in ten thousand who could do that. So he’s a very smart guy, he’s a great negotiator, but I think we understand each other.
“When you take over a country.” And when does one do that, Mr. President? And what kind of insane human being praises a cold-blooded tyrant’s assertion of murderous authority over his population on the grounds that “that’s one in ten thousand who could do that.” Could Trump’s teen groupie-level admiration and envy of dictatorial power be any more humiliatingly on display?
When Baier, stunned into a pregnant pause by Trump’s answer — as if he just realized, contrary to his assigned Fox News agenda, that he is inadvertently exposing the U.S. president as a simpleton with delusions of grandeur, and that there is no turning back — responds by stammering out, “But, I mean he’s still done some really bad things!” Trump replies with this:
Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things, I mean I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done. Now look, with all of that being said, the answer’s “Yes” — I’m going from today, I’m going from maybe ninety days ago.
Just as he has done before in defending Vladimir Putin against similar charges, Trump trots out the apologist’s typical last resort, moral equivalency. Other people are totalitarian killers too, he notes. And how exactly does that justify praising any one of those killers, let alone giving him everything he wants, as Trump just promised to do for Kim?
Finally, addressing the question of how his presidency might affect the midterm elections:
I’ve done more in five hundred days than any president has ever done in their first five hundred days.
No argument here. Trump has done more in five hundred days to demean the office of the presidency, to make his nation into an international laughing stock, and to sink the fading hopes of American constitutional conservatives, than any president has ever done in his first five hundred days. Case closed — and this very interview, fourteen minutes that ought to live in infamy, a time capsule entry for this historical moment, closed it.
The American president is demented, childish, delusional, lacks any semblance of a moral compass, has no shame, nor apparently even a vague intellectual understanding of the concept of shame, and repeatedly, consistently expresses more sincere admiration for and sympathy with the most tyrannical men on Earth than he has ever expressed for any ally — remember, he chose the context of touting his relationship with totalitarian Kim and his friendship with totalitarian Xi to take a cheap shot at republican South Korea — or for any past U.S. president, all of whom he denigrated with one swipe by claiming that none of them could have achieved the deal he just made with Kim. (See the 5:45 minute mark in the video.)
How serious is this problem? When Bill Clinton’s sexual obsessions were exposed, many people rightly wondered whether a man that easy to distract from his responsibilities, or that quick to cave in to a weakness of character or conscience, was fit for the most responsible office in the world. Today, the American president is a megalomaniac so susceptible to ego-caresses that he is literally giddy with self-congratulations over having shaken hands and signed a piece of paper with a grotesque tyrant who threatened to attack his country as recently as a few weeks ago.
Vladimir Putin calls him “Donald,” and Trump turns to putty and defends the murderous KGB oligarch at the G-7 summit. Xi Jinping plays him like a fiddle, and Trump imagines they have “a very good relationship,” says Xi is “an incredible guy,” and affirms his belief that one of the most infamously duplicitous regimes in the world is wowed by his negotiating genius and is bending over backwards to please him.
No, Mr. President, Xi doesn’t watch Hannity every night — that’s you.
Trump is a danger to his country, because his vanity resides in a stratosphere so detached from any grounding in common sense, political principle, or historical awareness, that his mind is completely at the mercy of whoever is clever enough to stroke his ego this week.
Meanwhile, I see that the top article on American Thinker Thursday was a paean to Trump’s own incredible guy-ness, demanding worshipful kowtows to the manliest man in the world, and mocking all who fail to fall to their knees before His Exalted Trumpdom as fools or traitors.
America used to be both admired and feared internationally as a nation full of — well, Americans. Those days, apparently, are gone.
