What did we learn from Trump's UN speech? He'll never change | Ross Barkan
The best we can hope for is a world where Trump and Kim decide they would rather play with other toys than their nuclear missiles
Donald Trump will always be Donald Trump. If anyone hasn’t yet learned that lesson, today was educational. Trump, the reality show, punchline president – he’s great for the Emmys! – rambled in front of the United Nations general assembly about “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea. His colorful language might even be funny if it weren’t for the fact that Trump controls a nuclear arsenal powerful enough to annihilate humanity several times over.
“If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph,” Trump said, detailing the horrors of what he deemed a “depraved” North Korean regime. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission” he said, adding: “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”
Trump is partially right. The United States does have great strength. But patience is predicated on whoever sits in the Oval Office. The world remembers only one country has murdered civilians with atomic weapons, and that was when a much saner president – Harry Truman – was calling the shots in 1945.
The best we can hope for, conservatives and liberals and socialists and paleocons alike, is a world where Trump and Kim decide they would rather play with other toys than their nuclear missiles. Unlike his father, Kim Jong-il, this new tyrant is more willing to saber-rattle and less inclined to even engage in the pretenses of a diplomatic solution. Kim, somewhere in his early 30s, is deeply inexperienced and profoundly erratic.
America reckons with its own deeply inexperienced and profoundly erratic leader. Trump knew nothing about governing before winning a Black Swan presidential election. He has not helped his cause by surrounding himself with know-nothings like Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Even Bannon, the overrated Breitbart mogul, understood a military solution to the North Korean problem was not a real solution. There is no “totally” destroying the isolated nation without putting the lives of millions in Japan and South Korea at risk. We know almost nothing about North Korea, and hidden missiles and artillery could inflict devastating casualties on our Asian allies before Trump’s bombs laid waste to the country. Millions of innocent, oppressed North Korean civilians would also die.
Maybe Trump knows this. Maybe Trump doesn’t. He is, charitably speaking, not a thinker recognized for his depth or willingness to learn things he does not already know. Even presidents with more shallow intellects – Ronald Reagan being one recent example – understood that a cabinet must be stocked with men and women who have an inkling of how to wrangle with vast bureaucracies and intractable problems.
It is disturbing to consider the terrifying stakes resting on the state of one mercurial, TV-addled mind. Trump should not be running a mid-sized city somewhere in the midwest, let alone the most powerful nation on Earth. Most corporations wouldn’t let such a character near their boardrooms, either.
The office of the president will not change Trump. He is the same man he was 30 years ago, only older, more embittered, and more emboldened. He is Trump in the United Nations, Trump in the White House, Trump at home at night, railing at the cable news.
There is an old expression that may have originated somewhere near Trump’s boyhood home of Queens. You can take the kid out of the neighborhood, but you can’t take the neighborhood out of the kid.
You can’t take the Trump out of President Trump.
