His naiveté is beyond staggering.
"I’ve developed a very, very good relationship” with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, said Trump yesterday to an assemblage of the nation's governors, each of whom must have sat positively aghast at the president's ignorance, compounded by an ego-inflated compulsion to advertise what he's convinced is genius. "He’s never had a relationship with anybody from this country, and hasn’t had lots of relationships anywhere."
From those words, one might think that America's Korean War deaths of 36,574 and 103,284 wounded, along with South Korea's 217,000 military deaths and 1,000,000 civilians killed, were merely the result of a colossal misunderstanding. The world simply failed to recognize the North's need to launch an unprovoked invasion. Since then, the nation has dedicated itself to perpetuating a hell on earth that separates it from any garden-variety despotism, outside of the past nightmares of Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia.
Quite aside from the infamy of its military nuclearization and repeated threats to use it, North Korea's gulag of "parallel penal camps" run by the country's secret police is a horror of almost unimaginable savagery. These Konzentrationslager house upward of 70,000 prisoners, most of whom are held behind "gated high walls and barbed wire fences [and] guard towers" for having committed crimes against the state. This according to a heart-wrenching, 2014 United Nations Commission of Inquiry, which perhaps, just perhaps has contributed to North Korea's paucity of "lots of [benign] relationships."
The "political" camps are kept out of sight from the general population and are "extrajudicial" — meaning their inmates "can be held incommunicado for life. Family members are held there also." Their purpose is to "preemptively purge, punish, and remove from North Korean society" (my emphasis) anyone the state suspects of ideological apostasy. Parallel camps of "punishment" are meant to house actual criminals, but the camps imprison political dissidents as well.
What constitutes a political crime? "Taking part in unauthorized gatherings; criticizing the state or even expressing dissatisfaction privately; possessing 'decadent' drawings, written materials, periodicals, music, movies or videos; and 'foul, hostile, or superstitious activities.'" Here's a twist for the international law books. A North Korean political crime can even include "not rightly selecting winning athletes for important competitions." As the Washington Post put it in its coverage of the U.N.'s report, "In other words, pick the wrong team goalie, and you're off to jail" — where prisoners are subjected to "deprivations … including starvation, forced labor and brutal conditions that lead to large numbers of deaths."
Such is the tenth circle of hell with which Trump (believes he) is fostering "a very, very good relationship," coincidental to his hostile relationships with America's traditional allies. Poor Kim, says Trump: "He’s never had a relationship with anybody from this country." Just a fluke of misguided history, I guess. From Truman to Obama, previous presidents simply failed to see the goodness of North Korea. Trump's "very good brain" knows better.