Impromptus

Trump and Kim, &c.

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President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un walk after lunch on Sentosa Island in Singapore, June 12, 2018. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
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Donald Trump has had an unusual relationship with Kim Jong-un, the dictator of North Korea. I detailed some of it in a piece published in October 2020: “Trump and Dictators.” Earlier this week, Trump was talking about Kim, saying,

Kim Jong-un of North Korea has tremendous nuclear capability. Everybody felt safe when I was president. I got along with him. I got along with him. You would have had a nuclear war if Crooked Hillary was there. You would have had a nuclear war the likes of which you’ve never seen.

And, by the way, he’s getting very anxious again. He thinks Biden is a total — I won’t tell you the word he used, but a very bad word, and you better be careful.

In May 2019, as the race for the Democratic presidential nomination was getting underway, Joe Biden called Kim a “dictator” and a “tyrant.” In retaliation, Kim called Biden a “fool of low IQ” and an “imbecile bereft of elementary quality as a human being.”

President Trump then issued a tweet:

North Korea fired off some small weapons, which disturbed some of my people, and others, but not me. I have confidence that Chairman Kim will keep his promise to me, & also smiled when he called Swampman Joe Bidan a low IQ individual, & worse. Perhaps that’s sending me a signal?

In my October 2022 piece, I wrote,

Set aside North Korea’s launch of its “small weapons” (which is not something to be set aside, to be sure): It’s not every day that an American president and a foreign dictator chortle together over the IQ of an American former vice president.

In 2006, the Venezuelan strongman, Hugo Chávez, issued a fierce denunciation of President George W. Bush at the United Nations. Charles Rangel was a left-wing congressman from New York, and despised Bush. But he did release a statement: “George Bush is the President of the United States and represents the entire country. Any demeaning public attack against him is viewed by Republicans and Democrats, and all Americans, as an attack on all of us.”

That seems a thousand years ago.

A bit more from my piece:

Trump’s press secretary, [Sarah] Sanders, was asked about Trump and Kim, and their chortling about Biden. She said, simply, “I think they agree in their assessment of former vice president Joe Biden.”

Trump himself, after one of his meetings with Kim, said, “You have a man that was so happy to see me. You have a man that doesn’t smile a lot, but when he saw me, he smiled, he was happy.” Later, Trump said, “People say he only smiles when he sees me.”


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That should make the blood of any foreign-policy “realist” run cold.

There is a lot more to say about this subject, but maybe I can conclude with two thoughts.

This week, Trump said, “He thinks Biden is a total — I won’t tell you the word he used, but a very bad word.” Is Trump in communication with Kim? If so, that is highly interesting. (I hope our intelligence boys are listening in.)

Finally, a wish — that you and I and Americans in general never get so partisan as to side with a monstrous Communist dictator over the American president.

• Congressman Tom Emmer (R., Minn.) looked set to be speaker of the House. But then Trump got to work — and torpedoed Emmer’s chances. “I killed him,” he crowed.

Some Republicans of my acquaintance — in politics, the media, and “think tanks” — don’t like it when you remark that Trump calls the shots in the GOP. But doesn’t he?

Evidently, Emmer had two main problems: He was not an election-denier. (He acknowledged that the 2020 presidential election was legitimate.) And he favors aid to Ukraine.

Those things are evidently deal-breakers in today’s GOP. Which helps explain, I think, why many have left the party in recent years.

Update: After this column was written, House Republicans chose Mike Johnson (La.) to be speaker. He was active in the effort to overturn the 2020 election and he is a staunch opponent of aid to Ukraine. More on Speaker Johnson in a future column.

• A report from ABC News is headed “Ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows granted immunity, tells special counsel he warned Trump about 2020 claims.” Meadows is quoted as saying, “Obviously, we didn’t win.”

Huh.

Trump responded in his accustomed fashion:

Consider: Tens of millions of people want this man to be president of the United States. Again. And he may well be.

• Another headline: “Jenna Ellis becomes latest Trump lawyer to plead guilty over efforts to overturn Georgia’s election.” (That article, from the Associated Press, is here.) I keep hearing from Republicans that these guilty pleas are nothingburgers. That they are, indeed, proof that the prosecutor’s case is weak.

I wonder.

• Alex Jones is a nasty piece of work — a liar, a charlatan, a fraud. He tells America that school shootings are staged. The dead children, and the surviving children, are “crisis actors,” you see.

He has a big following, of course, and he is a player in the Republican Party. Donald Trump appeared on Jones’s show in the 2016 election cycle. At the end of their interview, Trump said, “I just want to finish by saying that your reputation’s amazing. I will not let you down. You will be very, very impressed, I hope, and I think we’ll be speaking a lot.”

Another GOP presidential candidate, Vivek Ramaswamy, has been speaking to Jones. Get this:

These things matter a lot. Whom do our nation’s leaders legitimize? It matters — a lot.

• “There are no second acts in American lives.” So said F. Scott Fitzgerald. Well . . .

• A headline from the AP: “University of Michigan slithers toward history with massive acquisition of jarred snake specimens.” (Article here.)

Go Blue!

• “Why You Don’t Need to Rake Leaves.” That article is in the New York Times. Its subheading reads, “Thinking about raking freshly fallen leaves into a pile? Think again, scientists and naturalists say.”

Oh, cripe, now they tell me!

• The below tweet reminded me of Bill Buckley:

One day, Bill was exasperated with his printer. He said — I wish you could have heard his tone: bitter, forlorn, dejected — “All I want in life is for my printer to work.”

• A little music? For my review of Un ballo in maschera (Verdi) at the Metropolitan Opera, go here.

• I know politicos, I know musicians, I know athletes — I know a few others. But I don’t know mathematicians. Wish I did. I know Joseph J. Kohn now, thanks to an obit. (Often, you don’t learn of someone until he dies.) He “broke new ground in calculus,” says the headline. Major brain.

Question: What classes should you take in college? The ones you are interested in, right? Yes, but the teacher makes a difference too. If the teacher is great, or unusually likable — we may want to study with him, learn from him, whether we are hot on the subject or not.

The concluding paragraphs of the above-cited obit kind of warmed me. See what you think:

Dr. [Charles] Epstein met Dr. Kohn when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton and, he said, not fitting in. “I was miserable there, and nobody noticed at all except Joe Kohn,” Dr. Epstein said. “I didn’t work in his field. I didn’t know anything about several complex variables. He just decided, ‘There’s no reason for this guy to be so unhappy.’”

Dr. Epstein and Dr. Kohn became friends, and Dr. Epstein shifted his research to Dr. Kohn’s field. “Basically for social reasons, I went into the field of several complex variables,” he said. “I just like the people in the subject.”

I need to work on my algebra. Maybe my multiplication tables and such first . . .

• Betsy Rawls, one of the great golfers, has died at 95. For the obit (New York Times, as for Dr. Kohn), go here. There is a lot to say about Rawls. But, here and now, I’d like to hail the members of Winged Foot Golf Club, in Mamaroneck, N.Y.

In 1957, the U.S. Women’s Open was held there. Rawls won. But not the way she wanted to. I will quote the obit:

Jackie Pung of Hawaii finished with a four-round total of 298 to Rawls’s 299. But officials quickly noticed that Pung’s playing partner, Betty Jameson, who was keeping score for Pung, had listed a 5 on the fourth hole of the last round, though she had actually scored a 6. Pung had made the same error in keeping score for Jameson, who wasn’t in contention for the victory.

Although Pung’s card showed a correct total score, she was disqualified, as was Jameson, the automatic penalty under golf’s rules for a player who hands in a card with an incorrect score on any hole.

So the championship, along with $1,800 in prize money, went to Rawls.

“It’s always great to win, I guess, but I sure hate to do it this way,” United Press International quoted Rawls as saying. “I feel sorry for Jackie.”

But Pung wound up as the No. 1 money winner: Members of the Winged Foot Club, distressed over her losing the title on a technicality, raised about $3,000 to ease her loss.

Isn’t that wonderful? Sportsmanship. Gentlemanliness. Other (good) things.

Hope you’re having a peachy — or at least a tolerable — week, y’all. Later.

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