No one could have possibly predicted this.
Didn’t HRose predict it in his blog?
Never thought I’d see the day when a Republican president hangs a picture of a communist dictator in the WH.
I think Trump looks at these pics and sees, well, just Trump. Everything else is sort of a blur, which his brain just elides over.
Other presidents dealt ineffectively with Kim, but DJT dealt with him 5 times as ineffectively. MAGA!!
And none of it matters in terms of domestic politics. The number of people who really care about or even understand much about the realities of defense policy, foreign relations, and all that is minuscule. There is a weird dissonance with a lot of the Americans, in that they are quick to jump on some foreign events as threats, even when they have nearly zero real chance to inflict any serious harm, but are also just as quick to dismiss actual threats or potential disasters like Korea. Maybe it’s related directly to how difficult or dangerous dealing with the problem is–the more danger, the less you acknowledge it, because hey, if you actually have to confront real threats, you might have to confront your national narcissism directly if things go pear shaped.
For the Trump supporters, it seems Korea exists not as a real geopolitical context but merely as another stage on which Trump can demonstrate his difference from those namby-pamby liberal elites, by doing, um, stuff that is different from what actual intelligent people would do I guess.
Sounds like Trump needs to send a new love letter via Twitter. Maybe there are some military drills that we can cancel or something.
Maybe he can walk his fat ass across the border again and be pinky pals with Kim.
Honestly it’s not just Trump but all American foreign policy.
It’s painful for worldly, secular, multinational globalized liberals to admit but most of the US is still very isolated and self contained. The US is much closer to say Russia or China in our insularity than we are with Britain, France, Germany or other modern European states. Most people in the US really, deep down, don’t know much of anything of the outside world and, to be honest, don’t really care.
The “outside” world then, the world of foreign policy, then becomes to them only another stage on which to perform the gesticulations of domestic political concerns. When hillbillies dump trash on you for your Save The Whales bumper sticker, they are sticking their finger up against the multi-national world that wants to tell them what to do, and more than anything Americans hate being told what to do, even if the alternative is essentially self destruction.
There’s a strain of Americanism that relishes self destructive excess and impropriety, and in fact impropriety has become a cultural marker of conservatism. The same people that listen to the politically incorrect truths of Blue Collar Comedy Tour want to walk into Wal-mart in flips flops and a dirty T-shirt, buy 50 pounds of fried cheese, dump their trash on sidewalk while farting and screaming “FUCK LIBERALS” while they drive back to their trailer park because to them Americanism is a kind of antagonism against civil society, and they see their “American rights” as one which opposes and dislikes anything but naked individualism.
And it is for these people that modern Conservatives are authoring American foreign policy.
I mean yeah, we weren’t really doing shit before either, we just weren’t taking photo ops while doing nothing.
TIL:
again
Shapiro is a douche and a twit, but can’t argue with a word of this. DJT’s tweet is one of the most moronic of DJT’s life, which is to say it may be the most moronic tweet anyone has ever penned in the history of twitter.
TIL there is a bridge too far for even the dimmest of social-media-enabled bulbs.
I’m so glad we have a competent man in the WH. It would really suck to have a complete imbecile in there right now.
Well, that’s fine then.