High off of firing missiles at Syria and dropping the “mother of all bombs” in Afghanistan, the Trump administration is continuing to stir things up with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, usually known as “North Korea” and/or a dictatorial personality cult. Just who is that dictator, though? In recent years, the line of succession has taken them through a few, which Donald Trump, unsurprisingly, does not seem to know.
Trump’s knowledge of foreign policy issues—or any issues, for that matter—has seemed cursory at best, but we’d have at least hoped he would know which world-recognized unhinged totalitarian’s title he’s been trying to claim for himself. It really doesn’t seem like he does, though, as he demonstrated with this answer, given to Ainsley Earhardt in a Fox & Friends interview:
“You know, they’ve been talking with this gentleman for a long time. You read Clinton’s book—he said, ‘Oh, we made such a great peace deal,’ and it was a joke. You look at different things over the years with President Obama. Everybody has been outplayed, they’ve all been outplayed by this gentleman. And we’ll see what happens. But I just don’t telegraph my moves.”
But … “this gentleman” is actually two separate people. Kim Jong-un, the current Supreme Leader of North Korea, stepped into the role in 2011. His father, Kim Jong-il, was the leader during most of Clinton’s years, having held the position from 1994 to his death in 2011. So whether or not anyone has been outplayed, that outplaying has been done by more than one “gentleman.” Not only does Trump not seem to know this, but it underlines a more important truth about him: He doesn’t care.
The specifics of the situation are immaterial to him. He just wants to do big, loud, literally explosive things like take on North Korea to distract from his many faults, which seemed to work in the past. He doesn’t care who the country’s leader is. He doesn’t care about the people he’s endangering in Japan, China, and South Korea (along with North Korean civilians), because North Korea poses little threat to the United States. He doesn’t care about anything but himself, really, and this is just another in a long list of examples—it’s all about his ratings and not at all about facts or what’s a good idea.
If anything, it’s more likely that Trump’s pressure will cause North Korea to do something disastrous to their neighbors than to stop it from happening, but we don’t expect that kind of understanding—let alone caring about it—from a man who whose appreciation for details is summed up perfectly by his inability to read past a headline:
The president doesn’t read beyond the headline, part 1 million. https://t.co/Wt8kkRWqyZ
— Taylor Kate Brown (@taylorkatebrown) April 18, 2017
(via Ana Marie Cox, image: Shutterstock/a katz)
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