On Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump abruptly ended his second summit with Kim Jong Un over the North Korean dictator’s insistence that the U.S. drop all sanctions against the Hermit Kingdom in exchange for giving up just one part of its nuclear program, a deal that not even the world’s worst negotiator would go for. As such, Trump is now being praised for not completely and totally caving to Kim’s demands, as many expected he would. Obviously, though, the president did not undergo a personality transplant overnight, so he couldn’t leave Vietnam without deferring to his favorite authoritarian friend.
Speaking at a news conference in Hanoi, Trump told reporters that he chatted with Kim about the death of Otto Warmbier—the American student imprisoned in North Korea for more than a year who died days after being sent back to the U.S. with brain damage—and came away with the strong conviction that the brutal dictator doesn’t deserve any blame. “He felt badly about it,” Trump said. “He felt very badly. He tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” As a reminder, Kim is one of the world’s foremost human rights abusers, has ordered the execution of multiple family members, and runs a country that’s been described as “the world’s biggest open prison camp.” But sure! He totally didn’t know about this and must have been truly broken about it when it was brought to his attention.
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s comments did not go over super well stateside, where even human boil Rick Santorum called the president’s decision to side with Kim “reprehensible.” But of course, this is far from the first time the ex–real estate developer has sided with a maniacal despot over officials from his own country. Last July, he notably told reporters in Helsinki that he believed Vladimir Putin when the Russian president said the Kremlin did not interfere in the 2016 election, despite reports from U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement communities saying otherwise. In October, Trump explained that while it sure looked like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, he’d spoken to M.B.S. on the phone, and the guy “totally denied any knowledge of what took place,” which was good enough for Trump, and continued to be good enough even after the C.I.A. concluded the prince was definitely behind the whole thing.
Elsewhere in presidential infatuations with autocrats, Trump has invited sadistic strongman Rodrigo Duterte to swing by the White House and applauded the president of the Philippines for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” in the sovereign state where the government executes suspects in the streets. He’s hosted Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who once murdered more than 800 protesters in a single day, and told reporters Sisi was doing “fantastic“ work. He’s had no shortage of praise for Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is known for going after dissenters like a 16-year-old who insulted him and a former Miss Turkey who circulated a critical poem about him. Meanwhile, he’s called Kim a “pretty smart cookie,” and made it known that he thinks the North Korean despot is a stand-up kid. Trump may have ended the summit on short notice, but there’s probably no reason to believe the love between the president and his roly-poly pen-pal isn’t still going strong.
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