The little toe-headed boy looked up into his mother’s eyes, smiled ear-to-ear and pointed at the picture in his coloring book that he had just finished coloring. His mother smiled, tussled his hair, saw the colors ran together, across the lines, spilling into a montage of color, but not pattern, and said, “Donald, that is the best picture ever.”

Elated, the boy beamed back at his mom, “Mom, is it really the bestest picture ever, in the whole wide world? Is it Mom?” Patting him on the top of his head, she said, “Of course it is my little boy. Everything you do is the bestest ever.”

And so, it came to pass that Donald J. Trump did the bestest things ever all the time, day in, day out, everything he did has been the bestest (barring maybe the bankruptcies, marriages, lawsuits, lies told, fines paid, and lawsuits lost). But even for such a bestest guy, it was talking with the North Korean dictator and murderer of thousands, that was the bestest thing ever.

Trump tweeted, “…everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea…”

Wow, just wow. Can world peace really be that far away, now that the bestest meeting ever in the history of everything has happened and we are now and forever safe from nuclear war with North Korea simply because the bestest guy ever talked to the dictator?

The president went on to tweet, “Before taking office, people were assuming that we were going to war with North Korea.” Well, even the bestest guy ever can be forgiven for getting confused with the facts sometimes, right?

Trump probably just forgot that, no, we did not fear war with North Korea until he decided to trade nuclear war threats with “Rocket Man,” while “Rocket Man” promised to counter with a nuclear attack on the “dotard” in the White House.

But, yes, we all do appreciate that we are now talking to North Korea instead of talking about nuclear warfare as casual bar conversation. Maybe the bestest guy ever should have used language more carefully with a guy whose character we barely knew, and whose isolation might have drawn him to think launching nukes were an appropriate response to conversational insults.

In later tweets, to help all of us know the bestest guy was now solving world peace where others had failed, Trump tweeted, “This isn’t another administration that never got it started and, therefore, never got it done.” So there, only the bestest guy can achieve peace in a staged handshake with a mass murderer other presidents had refused to meet with.

But, sadly, even the bestest guy ever can forget we actually write down and record facts and events. We call it “history” and, although the president thinks a North Korean handshake means we can “all sleep well tonight,” (thank you so much, oh, brilliant supreme leader) we have, historically, twice worked years with North Korea to end their nuclear ambitions.

President Bill Clinton successfully froze North Korea’s plutonium production for eight years before the North Koreans cheated on the deal. President George W. Bush pursued “Six Party Talks” and negotiated with North Korea until the North Koreans fired more test rockets and refused inspections. President Barack Obama increased sanctions on North Korea.

But none of Trump’s predecessors chose to ignore the human rights abuses of North Korea and honor Kim, claiming his people love him until Trump did so. Kim is not a good man, his people are starving and oppressed and his country dangerous because of Kim. No American president should say otherwise.

Criticisms aside, thank you Great Leader for world peace.

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator, political enthusiast and award-winning columnist living here in the Tri-State.