NYT Op-Ed Congratulations on Fixing the Border, Mr. President!

[Celerity]

Should we pretend that Donald Trump made a real deal with Mexico?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/opinion/trump-mexico-tariffs-trade.html



Remember that time when Donald Trump was going to win the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the threat of nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula?

It was almost exactly a year ago. The president was about to meet North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in Singapore. A group of House Republicans nominated the president for a Nobel Peace Prize. The crowd chanted “No-bel!” at a Trump rally.

In the end, the main achievement of the summit, a propaganda victory for North Korea, was mollifying Trump, who’d been threatening nuclear holocaust. Kim Jong-un agreed to work toward denuclearization, but as even casual news consumers know, the North Korean definition of denuclearization includes the lifting of the American nuclear umbrella over Northeast Asia. Actual North Korean concessions were minimal.

Nevertheless, from the right arose a thundering, bullying demand that Trump be given credit. And a few progressives cautioned against making too much of the summit’s inadequacy, arguing, in part, that it was better for Trump to get suckered and claim victory than to lash out. Democratic critics of the summit, wrote The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart, risked becoming “de facto allies of ultra-hawks like John Bolton,” who wants to discredit diplomacy with North Korea.

It was a fair enough point, but also a tacit acknowledgment of the inescapable degradation of living under this president, which often feels like being stuck in a house with an unstable and abusive father. You can either placate him by humoring his delusions, or puncture them and risk unpredictable fallout. The choices are complicity or destruction.

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[sprinkleeninow]

1. Farcical emitting from a farce. eom