As the political world debates the latest claims and counterclaims in the Brett Kavanaugh saga—including an unironic plea from a former Hillary Clinton staffer to take “boofing” seriously because “small lies matter”—the crises of the world worsen. And President Trump is using one of them as a punch line.
His latest gag is a running joke about his torrid romance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Trump loves the Hollywood telling: Old nemeses who have cast off their past hostility only to realize that, in the end, they have strong feelings of another kind for one another.
Here is how he put it in Wheeling, West Virginia, on September 29: “I was really tough and so was he, and we went back and forth. And then we fell in love, okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
The audience roared with laughter. And Trump preemptively mocked anyone who would criticize him for his words. “Now, they’ll say: ‘Donald Trump said they fell in love. How horrible! How horrible is that! So unpresidential.’”
We’ll bite.
It’s horrible. It’s unpresidential. It ought to be discomforting to the Republicans who stay silent in the face of such stupidity for fear of upsetting him. It’s embarrassing for the country. It elevates and normalizes the world’s most brutal dictator, a man whose nuclear program, despite Trump’s preposterous claims to the contrary, remains a first-order threat to the United States.
The Kim regime, according to the United Nations, has “used deliberate starvation as a means of control and punishment in detention facilities. This has resulted in the deaths of many political and ordinary prisoners.” Further, the “decisions, actions and omissions by the State and its leadership caused the death of at least hundreds of thousands of people and inflicted permanent physical and psychological injuries on those who survived.”
But there’s more: “In the political prison camps of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labor, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades. The unspeakable atrocities that are being committed against inmates of the kwanliso political prison camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian States established during the twentieth century.”
And more: “As a matter of State policy, the authorities carry out executions, with or without trial, publicly or secretly, in response to political and other crimes that are often not among the most serious crimes.”
This reporting comes from a comprehensive report on the North Korean regime published by the United Nations in 2014. It was based on testimony at public hearings featuring 80 experts and witnesses, and confidential interviews with firsthand victims of the regime’s brutality and others who can corroborate their claims. At the time of publication, investigators estimated that the North Korean regime held some 100,000 political prisoners in four camps known for their brutality.
When the report was released, Michael Kirby, the Australian who chaired the commission, put the challenge in the starkest possible terms. “The gravity, scale, duration and nature of the unspeakable atrocities committed in the country reveal a totalitarian State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world. These are the ongoing crimes against humanity happening in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which our generation must tackle urgently and collectively. The rest of the world has ignored the evidence for too long. Now there is no excuse, because now we know.”
There’s no reason to believe these abuses have diminished since the publication of the report.
Under Ronald Reagan, the United States highlighted the evil committed by totalitarian regimes and spoke forcefully about the need for the world to confront them. It mattered. We know it mattered because those imprisoned by the depraved regimes later told us how much it mattered. Lech Walesa, leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement, said of Reagan: “We owe him our liberty.”
In 2004, Natan Sharansky told us about the importance of Reagan’s moral clarity to those imprisoned by the Soviet Union:
Donald Trump is never going to be Ronald Reagan. He is not going to use his position as de facto leader of the free world to rally the world to end the totalitarian regime in North Korea. He is not going to move the world “urgently and collectively” to stop ignoring evidence of North Korean brutality. Is it too much, though, to ask him to stop treating it as a joke? Beyond the downplaying of the atrocities themselves, what’s the point?
Trump answered that last question at the rally in West Virginia. After joking that he’d “fallen in love” with Kim Jong-un, he explained why he engages in such unpresidential behavior.
“Instead of having 10,000 people outside trying to get into this packed arena, we’d have about 200 people standing right there,” he said, pointing to the front of the room.
So, jokes about the world’s most brutal regime for the entertainment value—and to boost the president’s ego.
That Donald Trump is a real laugh riot. Isn’t he?
