Why Is President Trump Trying So Hard to Piss Off South Korea?

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Let me get this straight. First, Donald Trump pisses off South Korea by parroting the Chinese president’s claim that Korea was once part of China. Then he pisses them off again by saying the USS Carl Vinson is on its way to the Yellow Sea when, in fact, it’s cruising around in Indonesia. Then, today, he pisses them off again by saying he might terminate our trade agreement with them, and then demanding that they pay us a billion dollars for the anti-missile system we’re installing there.

But…we need good relations with South Korea if we’re planning to take on North Korea in some way. Right? Why would we be going out of our way to piss them off repeatedly?

It is a mystery. It is a Trumpism. Perhaps Trump still doesn’t realize that it’s not like the old days, when doing something stupid would get him some attention for a couple of news cycles and then go away. I thought maybe he’d finally figured that out after the whole Obama wiretapping fiasco.1 I guess not.

1In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that he was delighted with those tweets at first because they turned the spotlight back on him and that’s all he wanted. He figured it would be like the campaign, when he’d do this kind of stuff, bluff his way through it for a couple of days, and then everyone would get tired and let it go. I imagine he was pretty shocked that everyone took it seriously for weeks on end. Come on! It was a weekend tweet! It’s not like I’m the presi— Oh.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

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In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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