Think Like a Dictator

There's an upwelling of anger against Donald Trump among his allies for his defense of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. When asked about the death of Otto Warmbier, an American student who died from a brain injury after being released from a North Korean prison, where he had been sentenced to 15 years hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster, Trump said:

I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen; it just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough — they’re rough places — and bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he — I don’t believe that he knew about it.

He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.

Is Trump totally oblivious? Kim unquestionably allowed it to happen: Otto died, Kim is the absolute dictator of North Korea, he could have let Otto go at any time before the injury. Ergo, Kim allowed it to happen.

No, Kim didn't personally bash Otto over the head with a lead pipe. He lords over an evil dictatorship that kidnaps foreigners and throws them in prison for decades for bogus offenses. He then uses these victims as pawns to extort favors from foreign governments. For example, to get a meeting with Trump.

How can Trump not understand that Kim is evil incarnate and that he is directly responsible for Otto's death? Because Trump thinks like a dictator.

And by the way, Trump is doing exactly the same thing to women and children that Kim did to Otto Warmbier.

When victims of gang violence and poverty come to the United States from Central and South America seeking asylum, Trump's policy dictates the ICE throw them into privately-run for-profit prisons, separating parents from children. Some of these kids are put in cages. Some of them have been sexually assaulted in ICE detention. Some of them have died. Many of them will never see their parents again because they were so young when they were taken that they don't even know their last names, and their parents have been sent back to their home countries (or died).

If Trump admits that Kim is guilty of Otto's death, he would be admitting that he is responsible for all the travesties that happen to children in ICE detention centers.

It's the same with the Saudi prince, Mohammad bin Salman, and the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi: MbS wanted Khoshoggi dead, and now he's dead. MbS didn't slice up his body, but he ordered the hit and is responsible. But because MbS is best buds with Jared Kushner, and he's a dictator like Trump wants to be, Trump "believes" his denial.

Trump is jealous of dictators like Kim, MbS and Putin (who's had dozens of journalists and political opponents murdered) and wants to pull the same crap that they pull. Trump constantly trashes our democratic allies, but consistently lavishes praise on the most heinous tramplers of human rights.

It just baffles the mind to think that so many Republicans are defending a creature so thoroughly and indisputably corrupt. In a few months or years they will find themselves in exactly the same position that Michael Cohen finds himself in: they will rue the day that they defended Trump, that they lied for him, that they threatened people for him, that they sold their souls to this ineffably corrupt demon who will throw them under the bus the instant he no longer needs them.

Like Michael Cohen, or Michael Flynn, or John Kelly, or Reince Priebus, or Steve Bannon, or Rex Tillerson, or Jeff Sessions, or Rod Rosenstein, or Jim Mattis, or... Well, you get the picture.