Only Trump Could "Go" To North Korea - Granite Grok

Only Trump Could “Go” To North Korea

Donald Trump Kim John Un Singapore, HandshakeMr. Trump met with North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un. They sat, talked, signed a joint statement, and parted on what appeared to be good terms.

Back in the U.S., the reaction was no less polarized than anything else Mr. Trump does, but many were at least impressed with the fact that, given where we were a few months ago, this even happened.

It reminds me of the Vulcan Proverb; Only Nixon could go to China.

Yes, that was a fantasy but then so is what passed for ‘news’ on MSNBC.

MSNBC let its Trump Derangement hair down (if ever it can be said to have been up) to suggest that The Donald having done something no US president had ever done was not historic.

Trump met with Kim. No President has ever done that. And that’s not historic?

This from the people who thought everything Obama did was historic. Which, to their credit, given that he was the first Black President after Clinton, who was half as white as Obama times two, was accurate. We’d never had a half-black president who looked black so everything that happened, good or bad, was historic.

As was the media’s fawning coverage and obsession with hiding historic features like weaponizing the IRS against political opponents. Spying on everyone (including a presidential campaign). Bowing to foreign leaders. Overseeing the Democrat loss of more elected offices across the country than any president in history. Record low labor force participation. Record high food stamp participation. The list is long and not just the scandals, all of which were (as much as possible if not entirely) ignored, soft-peddled, or defended.

Trump gets no such credit. In fact, he gets the opposite. But whatever you think of Trump he has done something remarkable. Going back to Bill Clinton whatever the response (appeasement, saber rattling, or nothing at all) every administration prior kicked the can down the road. They did it for so long that North Korea managed to acquire nuclear weapons and missile technology to deliver it. Given time, they’ll find a way to do so reliably. And they’ve been inclined to share it (or at least sell it) to equally suspect members of the international community including Iran.

If they’d never had it, well, Obama wouldn’t have been able to free up billions in hard cash to Persian Mullah’s who also happens to be the world’s largest sponsor of global terrorism under the guise of a Nuclear agreement that Mr. Trump decided sucked.

Given how we’ve handled North Korea in the past, who can blame him?

The best course of action is trying to find a peaceful way to get unstable nuclear players off the board. Or find a way to make them stable. Barring that, you end up with bombs dropping, missiles flying, and people dying.

And still, the naysayers are grumpy about Trump’s diplomacy. But that’s because they are grumpy about everything Trump.

And that’s fine as long as we know where we stand, which we don’t with North Korea. Not yet.

There is no guarantee this new diplomacy will result in any better outcome than the years of can-kicking. But it has begun better (after appearing to be much much worse) than any previous exercise with this troubled nation.

So, the problem, at least in my opinion, isn’t whether we’ll end up with a better outcome. The media and the Trump haters were happy with the status quo so that’s not in the calculus. The issue is that Trump used the same resources every other Administration had to achieve a better beginning. One where we might one day have to admit, even begrudgingly (for some), that only Trump Could “go” to (meet with) North Korea.

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