One doesn’t often witness such praise, albeit begrudging, of President Trump in the press: Say what you will about Trump, but his tactics on North Korea are working.
Ever since the president announced last year that he would pursue “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean peninsula”, jeering has been the near universal response. It’s come from almost every imaginable American quarter: Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, expert and amateur.
But of course, it is Donald J. Trump. The media’s knee jerk reaction is to take the position that whatever he does isn’t going to work.
The news media is filled with leaks and speculation that North Korea clandestinely continues to manufacture nuclear materials and work on long-range missiles.
You never witnessed such ‘leaks and speculation” about Iran when Obama chose to believe their leaders were willing to give up their nuclear aspirations in return for a pallet full of money.
It’s not that the media, along with the rest of President Trump’s enemies, are cheering for nuclear war it’s simply that they hate Trump. They don’t want him to have any place in history other than the asterisk they intend to place after his name as the 45th President. And so they do everything they can to undermine him even if it requires lies and making stuff up.
No one quite knows why Pyongyang slowed its public and overt testing, nor why Trump’s bluntness and boasting that his nuclear button was bigger seems to have worked. But consider this: Trump largely inherited practices initiated in the Obama years, military moves that were meant to threaten and coerce North Korea in light of its diplomatic failures.
And so we arrive at step 2 in the Media v. Trump game: if his strategy does seem to be working, deflect credit back to “the smartest man with the highest IQ ever to be elected to the presidency,” Barack Hussein Obama.
And while “no one quite knows why Pyongyang slowed its public and overt testing” let’s just say that some us believe that threats, veiled and otherwise, often work in the real world.
As Ann Althouse observes:
I'm enjoying this genre of awkward acknowledgement of Trump success. Notice how carefully it steers around any potential criticism of Obama.
“Steers around?” I think it’s pretty clear that William M. Arkin feels that, all evidence to the contrary, Obama does indeed deserve credit for it. Because he’s so awesome.
Dang! I’m going to have to knock this iron wall down.
And intelligent.
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