Trump gives Kim the Kardashian treatment
Perhaps it will work, this hand of friendship that Trump keeps extending to North Korea. How, after all, do you prove to the paranoid leader of a paranoid nation that you mean them no harm beyond eying a bit of Pacific coastline for some golf courses and luxury hotels?
But there I go, letting my cynicism get ahead of my best intentions. But isn’t that the problem we all face when writing about Trump? How can we talk about the good he might occasionally, randomly, and surprisingly do, without being distracted by all the noise?
And let’s be perfectly honest. Nobody has had an answer to the Korean riddle since the war “ended” in 1953, though technically the Republic is still at war with the Democratic People’s Republic. American presidents, both blue and red, have tried big sticks of various kinds, all the time wrestling with the unsolvable calculus that sets any kind of military intervention against the 13,000 pieces of artillery sitting just 25 miles away from Seoul. Trump too has previously waved the biggest stick of all, hinting at nuclear annihilation, with his “fire and fury” comments in April 2017. Then those interminable calculations seemed to get too much for him, so he put away his big stick and turned to his carrot.
Except, of course, it’s less “carrot” and more “carat” in terms of the enticement that Trump is offering Kim. At times it feels like he’s confusing his Kims. If this were Kim Kardashian in the spotlight, the attention of the world’s press on these gilded settings might make sense. Does Trump think that Kim Jong-Un can be feted by fame? Does Kim want more exposure or to see the name “Jung-Un” on the side of a luxury condo? Does he think Kim exists in the same Twittersphere, where celebrity and politics merge to form one lumpen mess?
Perhaps he does. On Saturday, Trump used a tweet to invite North Korea’s dictator to meet him on the border with South Korea. That’s how we came to find ourselves watching that strange spectacle. It was, to say the least, an informal meeting. Nothing seemed prepared and little was scripted. The press jostled for position as Trump emerged and began to walk towards the border. None of it was pretty and there can have been no surprise when later, Trump’s new press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, got into a scuffle with (and was left bruised by) North Koreans officials unhappy with that form of anarchy known as a free press in a feeding frenzy.
How then to describe what happened? Trump and Kim approached each other from opposite sides of the DMZ. The latter seemed, for want of a better word, baffled. Think a hedgehog emerging to see the sun after a long winter. Think of Roald Dahl, with Kim in the role of Willy Wonka, emerging from his ruminations about chocolate to welcome some golden ticket holder into his kingdom.
That perhaps explained so much of the North Korean leader’s reticence – the body language, the inability to meet Trump’s gaze, the overall sense of hesitancy. If Kim acted like this didn’t feel normal that was because none of this was normal. It was even left to the American president, in one of those deeply ironic moments this border-obsessed president seems destined to make, to invite himself over the Korean border. Only then did Kim make the gesture and Trump took his giant step for Trumpkind, followed by a few more to make sure that he really was inside North Korea. He stopped, clapped his achievement, shook Kim’s hand again, and then returned to the South.
The point of all this, say cynics, was to ensure Trump’s name goes in the history books as the first American president to visit North Korea. Trump was there to take the victory lap without having run the race. Yet is it possible to read events more generously?
Well if “jaw-jaw” really is better than “war-war”, then credit does go to Trump. The stalled nuclear talks have reopened, under the watch of Mike “The Beast” Pompeo, who has also expressed his belief “that Chairman Kim really wants to get something done, something very significant”. Kim too probably thinks he’s edged a little closer to respectability, though, in truth, it’s Trump who has edged America further from international norms. The world, meanwhile, has edged no closer to solving the problem in terms of uranium, centrifuges, warheads, and delivery mechanisms.
Where we have progressed, however, is in terms of that bigger picture in which Donald Trump seems to think he can humanise Kim.
The message from the White House is constantly that about the relationship between the two men, and the letters they keep sending to each other. The emphasis is on working with Kim the man, who we are often told likes The Beatles, baseball, exotic cheeses imported from Europe, as well as the films of Jean-Claude Van Damme. He’s also a fan of water parks and expensive cars and what’s not to like about his love for cognac and whisky or good food? He’s just an ordinary guy who loves golf, horses, and, of course, his 2000 sex slaves known as his “pleasure squad.”
And there we run into the problem with all of this. This isn’t only about nukes.
Military experts are rightly worried that the more Trump gives North Korea, the more he normalises that reality in which the DPRK remains a nuclear power. The argument certainly makes sense. It’s hard to believe that Trump would spend so much time dealing with a festering dictatorship if it didn’t have The Bomb. Yet more disturbing still is how Trump is sanitising one of the world’s truly evil tyrants. He is creating a safe space, the same aspect ratio as our TV screens, in which the North Korea dictatorship can be seen in its best light. Kim smiles, looks civilised, and even innocent in that way that all oversized babies look innocent. And, yes, in that Roald Dahl-ish way, he looks eccentric.
It’s also this eccentricity that feeds a seductive myth. It doesn’t matter if a few of those wild stories of Kim’s barbarity are proved to be false. Though long discredited, stories of executions by savage attack dogs have transcended reality to become cultural. They sit in our collective compendium of horror alongside Thomas Harris novels and Hollywood movies obsessed with torture. We should discount them in the same way we should discount the gratuitous details that excite the worst kind of media: stories about execution by flamethrower, mortar, and even anti-aircraft guns.
Much of that cruelty is real but it is not resolved in the way that Trump seems to resolve it; by believing that a man who sends quality stationery cannot be all bad or that Western consumerism, as personified by Trump himself, can provide the answer. For all the talk of “reality”, reality TV is nothing of the sort and Trump cannot spin the forced labour camps, the executions, and famine used as a tool of totalitarian rule, in the same way as he would spin the accusations surrounding his own presidency.
And that, ultimately, is the problem of Trump extending a hand of friendship. It’s as if Newton’s third law might well apply to morality as well as physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite action, and in trying to pull North Korea closer to him, he is himself pulled closer to North Korea. The moment he stepped across that border, he legitimized everything that border represents, and America’s own moral borders shrank because of it.
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