Donald Trump played a bigger role in Kim Jong Un’s murder of his underlings than you think

| 10:00 pm EDT June 1, 2019
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This week North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un murdered several of his own people who had been in charge of the failed summit between Kim and Donald Trump earlier this year. At first blush, it was a reminder of why the President of the United States shouldn’t be so cheerfully in bed with a monster like Kim. Even if diplomacy is necessary, it doesn’t require complicity. But when you revisit why that summit failed, Trump played a bigger role in the deaths of these men than one might have initially thought.

To be clear, Kim Jong Un killed these men; Donald Trump didn’t kill them. Trump has murdered people, such as the immigrant children who keep dying in his concentration camps, but Trump didn’t murder these North Korean officials. However, it appears he did get them killed by throwing a tantrum.

If you recall, while Trump was meeting with Kim abroad, Michael Cohen was publicly testifying before Congress about Trump’s various crimes. This testimony was a disaster for Trump – to the point that Trump openly whined about the timing. It got so bad for Trump that he ended up blowing off the final day of his Kim summit and heading home early, not because of anything to do with the summit, but simply because Trump was in a foul mood about what was going on back home.

That summit ended up being an embarrassment for Kim Jong Un, because he didn’t get to have the closing ceremonies with the President of the United States that would have helped give him the credibility he’s been so desperately seeking. Kim murdered the people he’d put in charge of the summit because he’s a murderous psychopath, and for no other reason – as evidenced by the fact that he waited this long after the summit to do it. But Donald Trump was playing games with that summit to begin with, and when he bailed on it simply because his criminal scandals were weighing on him, he set things in motion that ended with Kim murdering those men. It’s a reminder of the consequences involved when you’re playing a dangerous game in bad faith.