Suckered

Autocrat admirer and aspiring autocrat himself Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump imagines he has great negotiating skillz, along with being a Very Stable Genius, etc.  But, as we and the rest of the world watched, he got played by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, succumbing to obvious flattery and the insipid belief he could solve an existential issue during the course of some photo-op "summits."  Here's the reality:

In a secret letter to President Trump in December 2018, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un likened the two leaders’ budding friendship to a Hollywood romance. Future meetings with “Your Excellency,” Kim wrote to Trump, would be “reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.”

Yet even as he penned the words, Kim was busy creating an illusion of a different kind. At six of the country’s missile bases, trucks hauled rock from underground construction sites as workers dug a maze of new tunnels and bunkers, allowing North Korea to move weapons around like peas in a shell game. Southeast of the capital, meanwhile, new buildings sprouted across an industrial complex that was processing uranium for as many as 15 new bombs, according to current and former U.S. and South Korean officials, as well as a report by a United Nations panel of experts.

The new work reflects a continuation of a pattern observed by analysts since the first summit between Trump and Kim in 2018. While North Korea has refrained from carrying out provocative tests of its most advanced weapon systems, it never stopped working on them, U.S. intelligence officials said. Indeed, new evidence suggests that Kim took advantage of the lull by improving his ability to hide his most powerful weapons and shield them from future attacks. [snip]

The result, two years after the start of Trump’s unconventional peace overture, is a North Korea that U.S. officials say is better armed, with a growing nuclear arsenal scattered across a network of bunkers newly hardened against a potential U.S. airstrike. Kim, meanwhile, has gained an advantage that has eluded other North Korean leaders: a personal friendship with a U.S. president — one in which Trump describes Kim admiringly and shows off what he has called “love letters” exchanged between the two leaders. The contents of dozens of letters were revealed last month by journalist Bob Woodward in his book “Rage."  (our emphasis)

So, as COVID Donnie played presidential dealmaker, the far more capable Kim was taking him for a ride.  And what, again, was the upshot?

“There have been a lot of efforts, but in substance, I see no progress at all,” said Chun Yung-woo, a former South Korea national security adviser who participated in nuclear talks with North Korea in the mid-2000s.

“North Korea is more dangerous. It has more nuclear warheads, or fissile materials with which to produce nuclear weapons,” Chun said. “In that regard, at least, North Korea has more capability to destroy peace on the Korean Peninsula. I wouldn’t describe that as any progress.”

We wouldn't either.  We would describe it as getting suckered, though.

(Photo:  "Welcome to North Korea, sucker!" /Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service/AP)