What a difference a few months make
Forget about “Little Rocket Man,” “bad dude,” “short and fat” and other insults.
Addressing the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea in Seoul, on November 7, 2017, Trump described “the prison state of North Korea” and its leadership — among other –as follows:
Workers in North Korea labor grueling hours in unbearable conditions for almost no pay. Recently, the entire working population was ordered to work for 70 days straight, or else pay for a day of rest.
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Parents bribe teachers in hopes of saving their sons and daughters from forced labor. More than a million North Koreans died of famine in the 1990s, and more continue to die of hunger today.
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An estimated 100,000 North Koreans suffer in gulags, toiling in forced labor, and enduring torture, starvation, rape, and murder on a constant basis.
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In the part of Korea that was a stronghold for Christianity before the war, Christians and other people of faith who are found praying or holding a religious book of any kind are now detained, tortured, and in many cases, even executed.
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North Korean women are forced to abort babies that are considered ethnically inferior. And if these babies are born, the newborns are murdered.
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The horror of life in North Korea is so complete that citizens pay bribes to government officials to have themselves exported aboard as slaves. They would rather be slaves than live in North Korea.
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To attempt to flee is a crime punishable by death…
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North Korea is a country ruled as a cult. At the center of this military cult is a deranged belief in the leader’s destiny to rule as parent protector over a conquered Korean Peninsula and an enslaved Korean people.
Addressing Kim Yong Un directly, Trump said, “North Korea is not the paradise your grandfather envisioned. It is a hell that no person deserves.”
During his most recent State of the Union Address, Trump reiterated “the depraved character of the North Korean regime.” He said, “No regime has oppressed its own citizens more totally or brutally than the cruel dictatorship in North Korea.”
Five months later, the leader of the free world, after disparaging our closest allies and ignoring his new dear friend’s “systemic, widespread, and gross human rights violations,” calls the “madman,” the mass-murderer of his own people: “funny” and “smart,” “very talented,” a man with “a great personality” who “loves his people and is loved by them.” A man whom Trump had finally “the honor” to meet.
When asked by a reporter about North Korea’s human right abuses, Trump called it a “rough situation,” but hey, “It’s rough in a lot of places, by the way, not just there.” This was amazingly similar to his unfazed claim to Bill O’Reilly — when pressed about Putin being a killer — “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers…Well, you think our country is so innocent?”
Finally, Trump put icing on his back-breaking flip-flop by saying, “I think [in Kim] you have somebody that has a great feeling for [the North Korean people]. He wants to do right by them and we got along really well. We had a great chemistry.”
A few weeks before the photo-op, Michael D’Antonio, a Trump biographer, had the “chemistry” all figured out.
“I actually think that these guys speak the same language,” D’Antonio said of Trump and Kim, according to the New York Times, “adding that the summit meeting would bring together two leaders who are supremely focused on their own images, intolerant of slights and addicted to flattery.”
“So we’re going to have a narcissist duet in Singapore, with these two guys, maybe the only two guys on Earth who know this song so well… And they’re going to sing it to each other,” D’Antonio said.
Yes, D’Antonio had it right and perhaps so many had it wrong
Lead image credit donkeyhotey.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.