MUHAMMAD: Trump, ‘Master’ Deal-Maker

The sad thing about there being a lying, egomaniacal sex fiend who admits to peeking at and groping women as president; the sad thing is that so many people want to be just like him. For example, a female congressional candidate made an ad for herself with a gun sitting on the table beside her. In Nevada a pimp — who legally operates several brothels in the state — has won a Republican congressional nomination. In Virginia, the GOP Senate nominee is a certified former Nazi party official.

The Trump family “charity” is being sued by New York’s attorney general for — among other things — paying $10,000 for a portrait of one Donald J. Trump that was hung in one of his golf resorts. Real “charitable” giving, those guys.

Now, photos have emerged showing the inside of a former Walmart in Texas that’s been converted into a detention center for 1,500 migrant children who’ve been snatched from their parents. The walls of the jail are lined with murals depicting American history and leaders, including one of Trump with the caption — in both English and Spanish — reading, “Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.”

The quote is from Trump’s book, “The Art of the Deal,” about his unsuccessful effort in the 1980s to drive tenants from rent-controlled apartments in order to tear down their buildings and replace them with a luxury high-rise. If we know one thing about this Dude, it’s that he’s a “deal-maker,” and he mistakenly believes the world is full only of people like him, eager to make a deal, and that’s it.

So it might be with the recently concluded, short-on-details, de-nuclearization agreement The Donald signed after the first ever face-to-face meeting between a sitting U.S. president and a North Korean leader.

“There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he proclaimed in one of a series of early morning pronouncements, adding that everybody “can now feel much safer than the day I took office” and people could “sleep well tonight!”

What a guy!

“Somebody Got Punked in Singapore,” Russell Honorė, a retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. who formerly commanded U.S. troops along the DMZ, said via Twitter, and told me again in an interview.

“When I say ‘somebody got punked,’ the expectation that we’re on a road toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is far, far, far, from ever happening,” Gen. Honorė told me in an interview. “The only card Kim has is the nuclear weapon and his conventional forces. At the end of the day we have an uncoordinated declaration that we’re going to stop exercising. If we stop exercising, we stop training.”

The lack of training, he explained, would certainly affect the readiness for combat among the 32,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea.

The North Korean leader apparently did not have to make any commitment of any similar reduction of military forces on his side, in exchange for the U.S. agreement. Honorė got me to thinking. “I think if Kim gives up his nukes today he will not make it back home,” Honorė tweeted during the summit talks. “I wish I am wrong I spent 3 years along the DMZ as Co & Div Commander.”

I thought Honorė was referring to the “Libyan model” which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had referenced once in the lead-up to the summit. But no. Honorė was not referring to the U.S. takedown of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, after he surrendered his nation’s weapons of mass destruction programs, and was left virtually defenseless against U.S.-instigated rebels.

No. Honorė said that North Korea’s generals would have engineered a coup d’état against the ruler whom Trump views as invincible, and someone he could size up in “less than a minute.” Suppose North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un is not the invincible ruler, but rather a figurehead, beholden to a posse of generals who hold the real power in the country? What would that do to Trump’s gamesmanship model?

“We gave something. We got nothing,” Honorė insisted. “We gave two things. We met with him, and we offered to stop our semi-annual exercises” of combined force: Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, along with comparable forces from the South Korean Army. “We’ve got to train together. If we don’t train together, we will not be able to fight together, and that’s our biggest deterrent is our ability to bring our combat power.

“If we stop training, we lose our ability to respond, without any corresponding requirements for the North Koreans to back their artillery out of the range of Seoul,” Honorė said. “We got nothing.”

So, the groove-maker, deal-maker, may have gotten “played” by the “boy dictator” who may really just be a figurehead, posing as a tough guy. Ha!

Have I got a deal for you!