Donald Trump Barfs Jokes About Pearl Harbor, Nuclear Annihilation All Over Japan's Prime Minister
Simultaneously cleaner *and* more disgusting than George HW Bush puking on Kiichi Miyazawa in 1992.
Donald Trump’s primary mode of communication is Internet Troll, so it shouldn’t be any surprise at all that when he hosted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi at the White House yesterday, he felt obliged to make rude comments about the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy, the military force of a government that ceased to exist nearly a year before he was born in June 1946.
Trump made his very funny joke when a Japanese reporter asked him why the US didn’t notify its allies in Europe and Japan before he launched his war for the hell of it against Iran three weeks ago. Here’s video, cued up to Trump’s weirdly belittling introduction of the reporter, whom he first called “a beautiful person from Japan” but then mocked for being “a little shy” when the reporter paused to make sure Trump had pointed at him.
The perfectly in-bounds question prompted Trump to suggest that US allies couldn’t be trusted, because what if they spoiled his surprise attack? And then (you can see Trump’s glee as he finds a chance to throw diplomacy overboard) Trump explained that as a Japanese person, the reporter should well know about his people’s inherent sneakiness and duplicity:
“One thing you don’t want to signal too much, you know, when we go in, we went in very hard and we didn’t tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan?”
Big laughs from Trump’s sycophants in the room but he needed to make sure the punchline landed: “Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor, okay?”
Both the reporter and Takaichi were too stunned to reply, “because you wouldn’t be born for another five years, you prick.”
Just in case anyone missed the point he was making about how your Asian people are almost biologically driven to dishonesty, Trump shot back at the reporter, “No, you believe in surprise, I think, much more so than us, and we had to surprise them, and we did.” That’ll teach him a lesson for asking mean sneaky questions of Donald Trump!
In an attempt to get his father to notice him, Trump’s son Eric posted a message on Twitter calling the exchange “One of the great responses to a reporter in history!” But his father will never love him as much as he loves a TV camera.
At another point during the Oval Office presser, Trump figured it would be a great idea to ramble, as he likes to do, about the possibility of using nuclear weapons against Iran, because surely the leader of the only nation to ever suffer a nuclear attack would appreciate that.
“This is a very volatile world, and the military equipment, the power of some of this weaponry is unthinkable. You don’t even want to know about it. Oh, you could end this thing in two seconds if you wanted to. But we are being very judicious.”
But let’s be fair. Apart from his made-up stories about how the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe supposedly nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize, virtually the only thing Trump knows about Japan is that a long time ago, it was at war with the USA, and we won. Other than his visceral resentment of Japanese imports, WWII is virtually Trump’s only frame of reference when it comes to Japan.
And hey, talk about judicious: Trump actually managed to stop short of pretending to speak in a Japanese accent, as he has done at some past events, like a 2019 fundraiser in which he pretended to imitate Abe. Trump claimed then that he’d asked Abe about his father, a Kamikaze pilot who survived the war because it ended before he flew a suicide mission.
Trump asked Abe if the kamikaze pilots were drunk or on drugs. Abe said no, they just loved their country. Trump remarked, “Imagine they get in a plane with a half a tank of gas and fly into steel ships just for the love of their country!”
According to a memoir by former Trump national security adviser John Bolton, Trump simply “loved mentioning that Abe's father had been a World War II kamikaze pilot,” which Trump would mention to illustrate how “tough” he believed Japanese people are. Bolton wrote that during a G-20 summit in Japan, Trump said that Abe’s father had been “disappointed” by not being able to carry out his duties as a suicide pilot.
So hey, there’s something Trump didn’t bring up with Takaichi, so score this one as a win for his inerrant tact and grace.
We suppose maybe someone who actually knows something about history might want to tell Trump that, for all his cherished beliefs that Japanese people are very cunning and secretive, it’s been known for decades that the Japanese government intended to inform the US that it was breaking off diplomatic talks and declaring war, with the notification supposed to be given about 30 minutes before the first wave of planes hit Pearl Harbor. Hell, it was even a plot point in the 1970 movie Tora! Tora! Tora!
But as that movie depicted — and as archival documents Japan released in 1994 confirmed — diplomats at the Japanese embassy in Washington DC completely fucked up their assignment, completing the translation of the complex, multi-part document late and delivering it to US Secretary of State Cordell Hull only after the attack was already underway.
You’d think Trump would appreciate how incompetence and bungling at a high level would be a problem in a time of war. Maybe there’s a lesson in there for the rest of us at least.
[Guardian / NBC News / Business Insider / NYT]
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Here's the thing about East Asian relations. You have to be kind of delicate whenever dealing with Japan, because of the atrocities they committed in China and Korea during WWII, and then their subsequent total humiliation at the hands of the USA. You fuck it up, and you'll end up deeply offending the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans.
If you don't know what you're talking about, it's best not to bring it up at all. Matter of fact, it's best not to bring it up, even if you do know what the fuck you're talking about. Of course, Trump handled the situation with all the grace of a drunk rodeo clown riding an angry bull in a China shop. (Or is it a Japan shop in this case?)
At any rate, I've got a vacation planned out to visit Japan in a few months, so I'm going to practice saying "I'm sorry" in Japanese until I get there.
"Trump actually managed to stop short of pretending to speak in a Japanese accent."
The most surprising thing in the piece, as it turns out.