Sometime between getting sworn in and shrugging off a growing contingent of white nationalists supporters, President Donald Trump missed the briefing on not trading insults with dictators who publicly confirm their intention to launch nukes toward America. That much can be inferred by Trump’s recent round of tweets, which feature him trading insults with North Korean Chairman of the Workers’ Party, Kim Jong Un.
“Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me “old,” when I would never call him “short and fat?” Trump tweeted Saturday. “Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!”
Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me "old," when I would NEVER call him "short and fat?" Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend - and maybe someday that will happen!
To be fair, the North Korean Foreign Ministry actually called Trump an “old lunatic.” The comments, which were part of a formal statement, also called Trump “reckless.” Propaganda from self-proclaimed socialist sovereign states should be taken with a grain of salt. But if you consider that Trump is a 71-year-old man who has advocated for sexual assault, attempted to institute a xenophobic travel ban, and said there was “blame on both sides” when white supremacists killed a woman during a rally in August, then no lies were told here.
Lost in the playground-style name-calling here is the chilling back-half of the statement out of Pyongyang.
“On the contrary, all this makes us more sure that our choice to promote economic construction at the same time as building up our nuclear force is all the more righteous, and it pushes us to speed up the effort to complete our nuclear force,” the statement concluded.
North Korea very much appears to be using the ballistic equivalent of $.99 store knockoff nukes. The missile North Korea launched over the Japanese island of Hokkaido in mid-September fell harmlessly into the ocean. But the fact that Kim Jong Un’s regime claims to be emboldened to keep improving the strength and range of their weaponry after each round of Trump rhetoric, is a legitimate cause for concern.
As for the rest of Trump’s tweet—the likes of which White House Chief of Staff John Kelly has reportedly been ignoring—Trump explained his proverbial peace offering of friendship.
“Asked at news conference with Vietnam’s president later Sunday if he could become friends with the North Korean leader, Trump replied it ‘might be a strange thing to happen but it’s certainly a possibility,’” the ABC News reported. “He said he doesn’t know if that friendship will develop, but added it would be ‘very, very nice if it did.’”
In short, we may face something akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis mixed with the plot of Step Brothers because our egomaniacal President can’t stop shading a foreign dictator via Twitter. The highest-ranking public official in America is out here behaving like a cast member from a Real Housewives spinoff.
