There is No Tipping Point in the Trump Presidency
Waiting for the end of the Trump presidency is like a long chord played on a guitar. You knew it had gone on too long only moments after it started, but it still proceeds to carry on month after month. There is no diminishment in the frequency or volume of the chord, no break in the tension. Just that discordant sameness.
I’ve quit asking, is this the thing that breaks the chord? Is this the thing that will make us all finally agree that there is something very wrong here? I’ve quit asking because there is no thing that we will agree encompasses that wrongness. We’ve embraced the friction. We’ve invited the tension into our homes and given them seats at our thanksgiving tables.
Yesterday President Trump visited the Joint Security Area in the DMZ where he waited for the dictator and then stepped into North Korea. Here, in late 2017 a man defected, after driving through a barricade, and crashing a Jeep. In the video of the defection you see North Korean soldiers run from the front of Panmungak Hall before they fire on Oh Chong-song as he runs across the border.
As Trump shook hands with Kim Jong-un in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on June 30th, you can see the steps of Panmungak Hall directly behind the pair. Oh Chong-song was hit in the back five times and airlifted to a hospital on a Black Hawk. Surgeon Lee Cook-Jong described him as a “broken jar. We couldn’t get enough blood into him.” As he tried to repair Oh’s perforated bowel, he had to contend with 10-inch parasites squirming out of his intestines, into his body.
The truth behind this handshake is that there have been no real accomplishments with North Korea regarding their nuclear weapons programs. The meeting, the public twitter invitations, it’s all stage craft. There isn’t agreement on what denuclearization would even mean.
Trump said after the meeting that the situation used to be marked by tremendous danger, but that “after our first summit, all of the danger went away”. That first summit was in August of 2018 in Singapore and was followed by a second summit in February of 2019 in Vietnam.
Unfortunately talks broke down in Hanoi. It was reported that North Korea executed the special envoy to the US, Kim Hyok Chul at Mirin Airport in Pyongyang for not properly understanding US intentions regarding sanctions. Another four ministry officials, including a translator, are believed to have been executed as well. North Korea has denied this but confirmed that some officials are in custody and under investigation for their performance at the summit. Another was confirmed to not be sent to a forced labor camp, but “kept silently in his office writing statements of self-criticism”. I’m not sure which part of that is supposed to inspire confidence that we are out of danger from a man who runs his country with the same paranoid vigor of Tuco Salamanca.
Is the measure of progress in nuclear talks really as small as shaking hands and making pleasantries? Do any of us really believe it’s that simple? Kim wants to deal only with Trump, not with his dyed in the wood advisors. And of course he does. I would too, were I in his position. It’s much easier to deal with the clown pantomiming the actions of diplomacy, than a diplomat who is going to expect something from you. Trump is like a pet bird who’s learned to mimic a human having a conversation and really believes he’s having one.
“We have a very good relationship” says Trump about Kim. “I don’t know about beyond the two of us, but I can say the two of us.” And that’s all that matters in issues of diplomacy with Trump. Otto Warmbier didn’t matter as soon as he became a hard question for Trump to answer during interviews. His death couldn’t break the chord. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word,” Trump said of Kim’s involvement in the torture of the American tourist. “He felt badly about it. He felt very badly.” As long as someone feels “bad” and as long as there’s an empty apology with the same behavior, the chord plays on.
