North Korea Delivers Shocking Response
I’m stunned, stunned I tell you! After six weeks of surrendering all their nuclear weapons and infrastructure in meek submission to the massive hands and best words of Mr. Alpha Nobel, North Korea has apparently forgotten who is Daddy around here and started issuing ultimatums again, threatening to cancel their big TV “summit” with the pretend leader of the so-called free world.
It turns out they don’t want the U.S. and South Korea carrying out regularly planned joint military drills, and are holding the summit, along with initial talks with the South Korean government, over the heads of the world as leverage for demanding the drills be cancelled. Gee, who could have seen that coming? In fact, since I started writing this, I see the North is now making a more direct threat to the whole process, a process they had supposedly entered without any preconditions, out of abject fear of America’s Dear Leader. So much for that Trump cult narrative.
Meanwhile, Israel is putting Trump’s face on a coin and naming him Honorary Jew of the Week. This is because they have learned the great secret of managing the insecure, ignorant twelve-year-old girl that is the President of the United States, the same secret France’s President Macron has learned, the same secret the South Koreans learned, the same secret the Russians learned years ago, the Chinese last year, and the Republican establishment during the 2016 primaries: flattery. Tell Trump he’s so great you just know he’ll do X, and you may rest assured he will do it, like any vain, naked emperor flaunting his new clothes.
Hence, even a lot of left-leaning commentators jumped on the Nobel Peace Prize bandwagon recently, because they realized the best way to push Trump down the talk-to-the-tyrants foreign policy road he was suddenly on was to tell him the world would love him for it.
By contrast, tell Trump he can’t do something, and you may be certain he will make it his top priority, just to show you how great he is. This is a man who used to send pictures of his hands to “enemies,” with messages like, “See, not so small.” (That’s a hint for all those publicly predicting that Trump will not run for reelection: by saying he won’t, you are guaranteeing that he will.)
But what happens when these two impulses of the vain girl clash? That is, what happens when Trump is torn between the positive response to promises of universal adulation and the negative response to questions about his “hand size”? We seem to be seeing that right now, as the global left, which was swallowing its pride in order to hand Trump the Nobel Peace Prize in exchange for encouraging his agenda on North Korea, has suddenly had to backtrack in revulsion at his exit from the Iran deal and his simultaneous race to open some semblance of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which is happening mainly because people said he couldn’t do it, and partly because the neoconservatives who captured his ear in the White House promised him the love and adulation of History if he did.
Israel has taken the lead in the flattery sweepstakes, and, for the moment, appears to be winning, to the chagrin of those who favor Islamist rule in the Middle East.
If there is any three-dimensional chess here, it is in the minds of political observers, as they try make sense of Trump’s ego — or rather his id — as American and international clever people vie to position themselves at the reins of this mindless and wild horse who happens, by way of God’s weirdest joke ever, to possess “the biggest button” at the moment.
My message for Trump: “We all know you’re going to run for re-election, because that’s what a weak man with small hands would do.”