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.
