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On August 17th of this year, which seems like millennia ago, Donald was asked whether he was prioritizing North Korea, the vicious totalitarian dictatorship, over South Korea, one of our closest allies.
Donald: No, I’m making it much safer. You see, I’m actually making it much safer. Kim Jong Un has always treated me with great respect. And we met on numerous occasions, actually two primary occasions, spoken and spent time. I understand him. He understands me. You’re doing war games. I get along with him. He didn’t like Biden, he didn’t like Obama, he didn’t like anybody, but I get along with him very well. No, what I’m doing is making things safer, just the opposite.
Safer for whom exactly? By the way, if it pleases you that a murderous dictator like Kim Jong Un likes you and respects you, you’re living your life wrong. I mean, I get it. Who among us doesn’t like to have sleepover parties where two, well, one dictator and one dictator wannabe braid each other’s hair? But I don’t think that helps anybody, except perhaps Kim Jong Un in his efforts to normalize his regime.
So how exactly is this making South Korea safer? Well, a day before that interview, Donald announced that he had ordered the Pentagon to substantially reduce joint U.S. and South Korean military exercises. Donald called the exercises totally inappropriate and hostile and explained his decision by invoking his very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, which is not how you do foreign policy, and it certainly isn’t how you protect your allies from a potentially threatening adversary who, by the way, thanks in large part to Donald, is developing nuclear weapons and means of deploying them across long distances.
South Korea’s foreign minister later told lawmakers that Seoul had been caught off guard by Donald’s announcement, probably because he didn’t bother to inform them of it. He said neither South Korean nor American officials involved in the alliance had known the order was coming. Pete Hegseth probably did, though.
That lack of communication matters because South Korea isn’t simply a country the United States happens to be closely aligned with. It is a treaty ally America has helped defend for more than 70 years. So once again, because Donald has his priorities completely wrong and cares more about what a totalitarian dictator thinks of him than he cares about a seven decade long alliance, that alliance is now in jeopardy.
Here’s a short version of how we got here. Korea was occupied by Japan until the end of World War II. After Japan’s defeat, the peninsula was divided. The Soviet Union occupied the North and the United States occupied the South, a version of what happened to Germany in the wake of World War II when it was split into four occupied territories, each one run by one of the four allies: Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union.
The Republic of Korea was established in the South in 1948. Two years later, North Korea invaded. The United States went to war under United Nations command to defend South Korea. More than 36,000 American service members died during the Korean War. The fighting ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty.
That same year, the United States and South Korea signed the mutual defense treaty that remains the foundation of the alliance today. Roughly 28,500 American troops remain stationed in South Korea, and the military exercises Donald is now cutting back on and, quite frankly, demeaning are part of the two countries’ longstanding effort to deter an attack from North Korea. North Korea, by the way, not our ally.
So how did America’s president end up describing those exercises as hostile simply because of his probably fictional or at least delusional relationship with the dictator they are designed to deter? We’ve been here before. When Donald entered office in 2017, wow, I was much younger, he wasn’t talking about how well he got along with Kim Jong Un. He called him Little Rocket Man and threatened North Korea with fire and fury. Remember? This is what Donald said:
The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea. Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.
Speaking of being much younger back then, my goodness, time is cruel. Okay, so that’s Donald pretending that he cared about North Korea. It was simply grandstanding because he feels like more of a man when he’s threatening to destroy entire countries. But less than a year later, everything changed.
On June 12th, 2018, Donald became the first sitting American president to meet a North Korean leader when he met Kim Jong Un in Singapore. And, probably not surprisingly, Donald emerged from that summit saying this kind of thing. When he was confronted about Kim Jong Un’s human rights record and told that Kim was a killer who was clearly executing people.
Donald: Hey, when you take over a country, tough country with 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 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator, but you gotta call people sometimes killers. He is a killer. I mean he’s clearly executing people. He’s a tough.
Guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country with 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 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator, but I think we understand each other.
But he’s still done some really bad things.
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 is yes, I’m going from today. I’m going from maybe 90 days ago.
By the way, Donald is talking about himself here. He’s patting himself on the back because he knows the only reason he is where he is today is that he was a trust fund baby who was given hundreds of millions of dollars by my grandfather and then inherited almost $200 million more, all of which, by the way, he squandered.
So yes, he is praising himself for having overcome the supposed disadvantage of being born into a very, very wealthy family and having the keys to the kingdom handed to him.
Killer. Kim Jong-un is a killer. Donald was raised being told that he needed to be a killer to get by in this world, so he equates that word with being tough and strong. The difference, of course, is that Kim Jong-un is literally a murderer.
Under Kim, North Koreans have reportedly been publicly executed for offenses including watching or distributing South Korean media. The regime also severely restricts religious practice and possession of religious materials, including Bibles.
Political prisoners have been subjected to forced labor, torture, starvation, and executions, and family members have also been imprisoned because a relative of theirs has been accused of something. North Korean agents were implicated in the 2017 assassination of Kim’s half brother, Kim Jong-un, with a chemical weapon VX at a Malaysian airport. Three months later at a rally in West Virginia on September 29th, 2018, Donald talked about the letters Kim Jong-un was sending him, and this is a window into how Donald’s mind works.
We are doing great. That was a big, big problem. And you know the interesting? When I did it and I was really being tough, and so was he, and we would go back and forth, and then we fell in love. Okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters and they’re great letters. We fell in love.
It’s hard to know what that means coming from somebody who doesn’t know what love is because he’s never been loved and has never truly loved anybody else. My guess is that those letters, those beautiful, beautiful love letters were AI generated, but two things are going on there. First of all, we now know that Kim Jong-un has had Donald’s number for a very long time and knows exactly how to manipulate him into doing whatever Kim Jong-un wants him to do. And again, Donald is demonstrating there just how desperately thirsty he is for attention and affection, and those things only matter when they’re coming from the worst people on the planet. After their meeting in Singapore, Donald announced that the United States would suspend major military exercises with South Korea, calling the exercise it’s very provocative and also complaining about how much they cost because why is it worth spending money on protecting one of our closest allies from a totalitarian dictatorship that has nuclear weapons it desperately wants to use?
The similarity to what is happening now is impossible to miss and we cannot ignore it. Five months after saying that he and Kim Jong-un had fallen in love, Donald met Kim again in Hanoi in February 2019, and this is what he had to say while sitting next to one of the most cruel, repressive dictators on the planet.
As I’ve said many times, and I say it to the press, I say it to anybody that wants to listen, I think that your country has tremendous economic potential, unbelievable, unlimited, and I think that you will have a tremendous future with your country, a great leader, and I look forward to watching it happen and helping it to happen, and we will help it to happen.
I can only imagine what Otto Warmbear’s parents thought when they heard that. And if you don’t remember who Otto Warmber is, he was a 22-year-old American college student who was arrested in North Korea in 2016 and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. North Korea returned Wambeer to the United States in June of 2017 with catastrophic brain damage. He died six days later. When confronted about this, Donald said, “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word,” unquote. There were meetings, phone calls, personal letters, and now reductions in military exercises, all because Kim Jong-un knows how to get Donald Trump, who is the weakest person who’s ever lived, to do what he wants him to do, just as Vladimir Putin is doing the same thing for his own self-interest. But Donald’s superior negotiating skills haven’t delivered anything for the South Korean or the American people.
North Korea has not denuclearized. It continues to expand its nuclear arsenal and it’s developing increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles capable of reaching very far away countries, including the United States of America. Thanks to Donald, Kim Jong-un is more powerful today perhaps than he has ever been. North Korea has forged a much deeper military relationship with Russia, deploying approximately 14,000 troops to support Russia’s illegal war against our ally Ukraine, and it is also supplying Moscow with weapons and ammunition. Kim’s grip on his own people has also tightened a major. Okay, let’s stop right there. We don’t need this slow.
Donald’s relationship with Kim Jong-un is deeply troubling, but it has to have more to do. Sorry. This is all deeply disturbing, of course, but I think that Donald’s bizarre relationship with Kim Jong-un goes beyond his desperate need for attention from people he wants to emulate because Donald wants nothing more than to be emperor of the world, somebody who’s omnipotent and beyond accountability. But I think it also has something to do with South Korea. If you’ll remember, former South Korean president Yun Suk Yol attempted to impose martial law on his country in December 2024. He was arrested, he was tried, he was convicted, and then this traitor to South Korea who had been its president was sentenced to life in prison in February of this year, all because he led an insurrection after attempting to impose martial law. Maybe that just hits a little too close to home for Donald, and he does not want to be associated with a country that, unlike us, actually knows how to hold traders accountable.
Political prisoners have been subjected to forced labor, torture, starvation, and executions, and family members have also been imprisoned because a relative of theirs was accused of something.
North Korean agents were implicated in the 2017 assassination of Kim’s half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, who was killed with the chemical nerve agent VX at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia.
At a rally in West Virginia on September 29, 2018, Donald talked about the letters Kim Jong-un was sending him, and this is a window into how Donald’s mind works.
We are doing great. That was a big, big problem. And you know the interesting thing? When I did it and I was really being tough, and so was he, and we would go back and forth, and then we fell in love. Okay? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.
It’s hard to know what that means coming from somebody who doesn’t know what love is because he’s never been loved and has never truly loved anybody else. My guess is that those letters, those beautiful, beautiful love letters, were AI generated, but two things are going on there.
First of all, we now know that Kim Jong-un has had Donald’s number for a very long time and knows exactly how to manipulate him into doing whatever Kim Jong-un wants him to do. And again, Donald is demonstrating just how desperately thirsty he is for attention and affection, and those things only matter when they’re coming from the worst people on the planet.
After their meeting in Singapore, Donald announced that the United States would suspend major military exercises with South Korea, calling the exercises “very provocative” and also complaining about how much they cost. Because why is it worth spending money on protecting one of our closest allies from a totalitarian dictatorship that has nuclear weapons?
The similarity to what is happening now is impossible to miss, and we cannot ignore it.
Five months after saying that he and Kim Jong-un had fallen in love, Donald met Kim again in Hanoi in February 2019. This is what he had to say while sitting next to one of the most cruel and repressive dictators on the planet:
As I’ve said many times, and I say it to the press, I say it to anybody that wants to listen, I think that your country has tremendous economic potential. Unbelievable. Unlimited. And I think that you will have a tremendous future with your country, a great leader, and I look forward to watching it happen and helping it to happen, and we will help it to happen.
I can only imagine what Otto Warmbier’s parents thought when they heard that.
And if you don’t remember who Otto Warmbier was, he was a 22-year-old American college student who was arrested in North Korea in 2016 and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. North Korea returned Warmbier to the United States in June 2017 with severe neurological injuries. He died six days later.
When confronted about Kim’s knowledge of what had happened to Warmbier, Donald said:
He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.
There were meetings, phone calls, personal letters, and reductions in military exercises, all because Kim Jong-un knows how to get Donald Trump, who is the weakest person who’s ever lived, to do what he wants him to do, just as Vladimir Putin is doing the same thing for his own self-interest.
But Donald’s superior negotiating skills haven’t delivered denuclearization. North Korea has not denuclearized. It continues to expand its nuclear capabilities and develop increasingly sophisticated ballistic missiles. North Korea has also forged a much deeper military relationship with Russia, deploying approximately 14,000 troops to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and supplying Moscow with weapons and ammunition.
This is all deeply disturbing, of course, but I think Donald’s bizarre relationship with Kim Jong-un goes beyond his desperate need for attention from people he wants to emulate. Donald wants nothing more than to be emperor of the world, somebody who is omnipotent and beyond accountability.
But I think it also has something to do with South Korea.
If you’ll remember, former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law on his country in December 2024. He was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison in February of this year after being found guilty of leading an insurrection connected to his attempt to impose martial law.
Maybe that just hits a little too close to home for Donald, and he does not want to be associated with a country that, unlike us, actually knows how to hold traitors accountable.
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