Trump Finds His Soul Mate

 

(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link to www.thecommonercall.org )

*****

 

“The President of the United States of America is an office which imposes a vast, consequential responsibility on the person who holds it to represent America’s values to the world. If those values are liberty, equality, freedom, the rule of law, and the Constitution, Trump is failing on every front. If they are the values of the thug, the tyrant, the bully, the circus freak third-world tinpot?

“Then he’ll get his pledge pin any day now.”

— Rick Wilson, Daily Beast (6/15/18)

*****

Kim Jong-un: How The Boy Dictator Outwitted Trump

By Benjamin Haas
The Guardian (6/16/18)

But through a combination of ruthless ambition and luck, Kim achieved what no other leader of North Korea has, recognition as the head of a nuclear power and international statesman. The boy dictator went head-to-head with Trump and won.

The document Trump and Kim signed, in the midst of a great deal of theatrics, confirmed positions North Korea has been espousing for years.

Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s older half brother, was widely seen as next in line but fell out of favour in 2001 when he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport so he could visit Tokyo Disneyland. Shortly after this incident, Kim began being groomed for senior leadership, attending the top officer training school in Pyongyang.

When Kim came to power it was not so much his father’s shoes he slipped into as his grandfather’s.

Where Kim’s father was a recluse who shunned public attention, the young leader is outgoing, frequently photographed embracing ordinary citizens, a broad smile across his face. Where Kim Jong-il would pen a New Year’s editorial, Kim Jong-un delivers a speech broadcast on television.

“He’s much more willing to take risks than previous leaders, and he has shown a new side of admitting fault. That’s a whole different attitude that we haven’t seen before,” says Jenny Town, the managing editor of monitoring group 38 North. “Ultimately, these high-level summits, with the US and China, after all the war talk and the suffering the people endured, shows that in the end world leaders are treating North Korea as an equal, and that plays well domestically.”

His sister, Kim Yo-jong, is a senior official in the Propaganda and Agitation Department and has reportedly worked to craft an image that evokes the revolutionary leader. …

Read the Rest

*****

Donald Trump Longs To Be Dictator

By Amanda Terkel
HuffPost (6/15/18)

There’s nothing President Donald Trump admires more than strength. When he really wants to disparage people, he’ll call them “weak” or “low energy” or “sleepy.”

 And for Trump, no one is stronger than a strongman.

“He’s the head of a country. And I mean, he is the strong head,” Trump said of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Friday morning.

“He speaks, and people sit up at attention,” he added. “I want my people to do the same.”

Trump later clarified that he was joking. Sure, but it’s not as if it’s the first time he has, often seriously, expressed admiration for dictators and their totalitarian states. …

Read the Rest

*****

Americans Won’t ‘Sit Up’ For ‘Great Leader’ Trump, Because They Don’t Approve Of Him

By Juan Cole
Informed Consent (6/16/18)

Trump on Friday added to the astronomic tally of his bizarre brainfarts by saying of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”

Politico’s interviewees are afraid that Trump is normalizing Stalinist tactics, using phrases like “enemy of the people.” And while that may be true of a small number of his acolytes, most Americans don’t like Trump or his ways and certainly are not going to fall into lockstep. Many working class people who voted for him (not as big a group as the business classes and corporate news networks fondly imagine) are already regretting it, as he destroyed their access to health care insurance.

The reason for which Trump’s hope is forlorn is that, as Pew’s scientific polling demonstrates, the vast majority of Americans don’t like and don’t approve of Trump, whose ratings in the polls remain shockingly low for a sitting president at this point in his tenure. Concentrating only on one data point, of favorable/ unfavorable hides a great many key insights as to how despised Trump really is.

Fully 58% of Americans say that they have no or almost no areas of agreement with Trump. That is almost 6 in ten. And while the number has fallen from 77% last year this time, remember what we are talking about. I mean, Trump takes lots of stances on lots of things. Hell, there are things I agree with him about, like the desirability of getting out of Syria (assuming he really means it when he says that). Nearly 6 in 10 Americans are saying his positions are completely or almost completely alien to them.

Even 42% of Republicans say that they agree with him on some but not all issues. Given that 88% of Democrats have no or almost no areas of agreement with Trump, that so many in his own party demur from at least some of his major positions shows just how much of a minority president he is. …

Read the Rest

  • Um, No Thanks! So Few People Want To Work At The White House It’s Reduced To Advertising At A Job Fair — The usual challenge in filling jobs in the White House is picking the very best candidates out of an enormous pool of eager applicants. The challenge in the Trump White House is filling jobs at all—to the point where White House and other administration jobs are being advertised at a job fair. The “Conservative Partnership Institute” is hosting the fair, which top White House personnel managers plan to attend. … Read the Rest