No Collusion! (Just Good Old-Fashioned Surrender)

Last year, when Trump’s supporters, Trump’s skeptics, and many of Trump’s alleged Democratic opponents were chanting or at least conceding that a Nobel Peace Prize might be in the offing in light of his “new approach” to the North Korean threat, I was almost a lone voice calling the whole thing a typical Trump flim-flam show, and highlighting the essential surrender to communists entailed in his “beautiful friendship” with the sex-slave-owning thug Kim Jong Un. 

I explained, further, that not only did the “peace in our time” “agreement” Trump signed with Kim in Singapore fail to extract one single concession from North Korea, while making several extremely significant concessions to Kim in “return” — meaning that Trump was unilaterally caving in to all of Kim’s demands — but that Trump actually sweetened the already-sugar-overloaded deal after the fact by cancelling long-standing joint military drills with South Korea for no reason other than because he thought it might please Kim.

Naturally, we are now seeing what happens when you make concessions to a thug entirely in reaction to his threats, without demanding anything of him in return: He learns that his bluster works, and raises his demands further. 

And we are also learning what happens when a coward and fraud, a vain blowhard without an ounce of principle or gumption, runs up against the increased demands of the thug who is flagrantly mocking and manipulating him: He begs for mercy and promises to do whatever else the bully asks of him.

So it is that Trump is now touting the “beautiful letter” he just received from his great friend and brilliant young leader Kim Jong Un. The main substance of the letter, as Trump tells us in his usual tone of one bragging about having been had for lunch by a smarter man:

A “small apology” and a demand that the “ridiculous and expensive” joint military drills must end as a condition for continuing “talks.” And Trump leaves no doubt as to his response, stating in answer to Kim’s condition that he looks forward to seeing Kim “in the not too distant future!”

This reply, once again amplifying his enthusiasm for Kim’s friendship and beautiful dreams for his country, comes just days after Trump was all over the television news here in South Korea decrying the fact that for years, America has spent so much money supporting South Korea while getting “basically nothing” in return, whereas now South Korea is going to “pay a lot more.” In other words, in classic cowardly style, Trump is using a phony criticism of America’s friend and ally to justify the full-on surrender he is about to offer in reply to Kim’s demands. 

Trump reinforces his assertion, based on nothing but his ego, that “A nuclear free North Korea will lead to one of the most successful countries in the world!” One of the most successful communist dictatorships in the world! At the direct expense (and security risk) of one of the world’s real success stories right there on the border with Trump’s new best friend, the fat tyrant.

The South Korean television broadcast I mentioned above, in which Trump was mocking and belittling the ally alongside whom America has resisted the forces of global communism for seventy years, appeared while I was sitting in a hospital waiting room with my wife. As the only non-Koreans in the room, we felt momentarily embarrassed, and jokingly hoped that no one mistook us for Americans at that moment.

It occurred to me that this must be how actual Americans — the ones with principles and consciences, that is — feel about Trump’s international performance on a daily basis. How genuinely pitiable. What a shameful waste of the last breath of a once-beautiful republic. 

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