Donald Trump just got played like a fiddle
For the past week we’ve watched Speaker Nancy Pelosi press every one of Donald Trump’s buttons in calculated fashion, pushing him into the kind of deranged meltdown that can only cause even more Americans to demand his impeachment and ouster. It’s fitting that Trump is now suddenly in Asia. It was a pre-planned trip, but you still can’t shake the notion that he somehow traveled to the other side of the world just so she couldn’t keep pummeling him. The trouble is, Trump is now getting played like a fiddle in the eastern hemisphere as well.
Murderous dictator Kim Jong-Un has never exactly come across as a brilliant strategist. Yet Donald Trump is such an easy mark, Kim merely had to plant an op-ed in one of his own newspapers which made fun of Joe Biden, using some of Trump’s favorite verbiage – and sure enough, Trump took the bait by publicly praising Kim for it. Just like that, a two-bit dictator managed to play the President of the United States. But he wasn’t the only one.
Based on Trump’s own tweets, we know precisely how Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe managed to play him. Abe took Trump golfing, because you always manipulate a narcissist by pretending you like whatever he likes. Abe also made a point of telling Trump that he likes the specific famous American golfers who have most recently been seen on the golf course with Trump, because again, that’s how you play a narcissist. And Trump, like the easy mark that he is, turned around and tweeted all of this – as if it somehow made him look good. In reality, Trump is merely handing every world leader a roadmap for how to manipulate him.
Donald Trump has already used his Asia trip to publicly side with a murderous enemy foreign leader over a former United States Vice President, and to unwittingly brag about how he got played by an allied foreign leader. Meanwhile his criminal scandals continue to close in on him. At this rate, he’d do better to simply never come home.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report