How Trump got trumped

By Deauwand Myers

The recent debacle at the summit in Vietnam between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was to be expected. Trump adores dictators, and wants to be one.

Unlike the 45th U.S. president, Kim is an actual dictator. Brutal, venal, and cruel, Kim does have one quality any world leader should have. Simply: he is well prepared and deadly serious. He has been groomed to run North Korea for years, and the Kim regime has been dealing with the West, particularly the United States in relation to sanctions and the DPRK's nuclear program, for decades.

Trump's ego, unlike his intellect, is very large. Had he been smart and intellectually curious (a quality he and Bush II lack) he would have read up on the important issues, mechanics, and aims attendant to the ultimate goal of the West and South Korea: the DPRK's complete, verifiable, and irreversible nuclear disarmament.

To be fair, Trump is correct on a few points: The status quo of heavy sanctions, stalled talks, the North's perpetual reneging on past nuclear agreements, and more sanctions, hasn't really worked.

There's a simple and sad reason this is so: Unlike other autocratic countries such as China, Russia or Iran, North Korea has no concern about its population or their well-being. By "concern," I mean fear of a popular uprising or regime change due to grassroots organizing.

Impoverished for so long and brainwashed to adore the Kim regime, many North Koreans do not have the will, and certainly the means, to uproot Kim and company. Starvation is a much more pressing matter for the average North Korean than the lofty goals attendant to a liberal democracy.

This generational weakening of the North Korean people means that sanctions only hurt them, not North Korea's political elite, and so the carrot (lifting sanctions) and the stick (more sanctions) loses the former's luster and the latter's bite, especially since this scenario has been played out time and again over decades and several American administrations.

The wealthy and well-connected in North Korea live like kings and queens, even by Western standards. They can afford to successfully negotiate international sanctions.

Worse, bloviating, blustery, corpulent Trump makes the mistake of believing his own dishonest self-aggrandizing. He knows "more than the generals," because he watches Sunday morning political talk shows.

He cannot be counseled on most issues, especially geopolitics, and he often undermines his own administration's policy via fiat and unedited, unfiltered tweets. A wise man knows he knows nothing. A foolish one: Donald Trump.

Empty buckets make a lot of noise, so Trump wanted credit and even a Nobel Peace Prize for his failed summits with Kim.

The important question, or at least one of them, we should ask about the Singapore and Vietnam summits is this: What did Kim get out of these talks?

He was able to have his flag flown next to America's and be seen with the most powerful man in the world on the global stage. Kim was legitimated, in a way, by an illegitimate, immoral, mendacious, petty, malignant narcissist who is, worst of all, I'm sorry, an idiot.

Trump's ascendancy to the Republican nomination and the presidency should teach America a lot about the lies it tells itself and the world. There are many, far too many, for me to enumerate an exhaustive list, but the two I'll focus on are illustrative of Trump and his geopolitical blunders:

"If you work hard, you will succeed." People of color have been working hard for generations, and have little to show for it in the way of accrued wealth or financial stability. Trump was given hundreds of millions of dollars by his virulently racist father, and squandered his wealth several times over, before stabilizing.

"America is a meritocracy." Really? If the recent college entrance bribery scandal in the United States perpetrated by the very wealthy and well-connected is any evidence, America has never appreciated merit.

Trump's presidency, shod full of rich, white men and women who inherited much of their fortunes, is a stark reminder that power and privilege produces "merit," where talent and intelligence are woefully absent.

Being racist and unenlightened and unmolested by empirical evidence is to be an American conservative, so Trump is in good company in this regard. The problem is, an idiot with a Twitter account is one thing. An idiot with a Twitter account and the nuclear codes is something entirely different.

Although America deserves this horrible man as its president, the world does not. If our species is to survive, we need world leaders who believe in science, lest half our cities drown in seawater and our way of live be irrevocably altered.

But if Trump is America's president for a second term, annihilation may come much quicker.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.