Trump’s No Good, Very Bad, Botched 2019 North Korean Spy Operation

Guess he and Kim aren’t friends any more!

Kim Jong Un and Ju-Ae (from North Korean state television)

Once upon a time, around winter of 2019, Donald Trump was president of the United States, and Kim Jong-un was Supreme Leader of North Korea. And it seemed to all the world like the two had been having quite a love affair!

Kim was visibly squeee-happy at their Singapore summit in June of 2018 when Trump saluted a North Korean general, and after that meeting Trump had nothing but praise for the man whose country had just beaten and tortured American and UVA student Otto Warmbier into a vegetative state for allegedly stealing a poster, and who regularly tortures his own citizens and lets them starve.

But Trump’s and Kim’s relationship didn’t start out so warmly. They started out exchanging bitchy sentiments because Kim wouldn’t quit testing missiles. Trump tweeted that Kim was a “madman” and ranted that he was “Little Rocket Man” at the UN, and Kim vowed to “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.” A quick recap:

But right before Trump and Kim met in person in 2018, something changed. It seemed the two hellcats had tamed each other! Or as North Korean state television put it, “A new relationship, meeting the needs of the accelerating times, is like pine needles.”

Whatever that means, indeed they seemed to be getting along like a pine-tar factory on fire, and Trump started praising Kim and their “fantastic chemistry.” He even had his secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, give Kim an Elton John CD, which was so cringe.

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How Sweet Of Dear Leader Trump To Make Kim Jong-Un A Mixtape!

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And then Kim started sending Trump those beautiful love letters, probably spritzed with perfume and the I’s dotted with little hearts. Trump cooed at a rally in West Virginia: “We fell in love. No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters.”

Eventually Kim sent at least 27 of those letters, in which he called Trump “Your Excellency” and gushed that maybe soon there would be “another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.” The letters were so precious to Trump that he even tucked them into the boxes of documents he stole and stashed in his Mar-a-Lago shitter. And Kim even stopped his nuclear missile tests for about a year!

And the whole world was like, yeah, those two are definitely fucking, we think?

But a fantasy film it was indeed, and Trump fucks his friends hardest of all! In spite of the warmth between them, the New York Times has reported that in 2018, mere months after gushing over those letters, Trump approved a plan for the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 to sneak into North Korea with submarines and soldiers in scuba gear, to plant a listening device to spy on Kim. And in winter of 2019, they tried to pull off the plan. But it got botched, bigly, when the team thought they’d been spotted by a small boat manned by a crew of North Koreans, and shot two or three unarmed, innocent civilians who turned out to have been simply diving for shellfish. And then Navy SEALs punctured the boat crew’s lungs with knives to make sure their bodies would sink. Which sounds like it would take a lot of stabbing.

It’s unknown if North Korea ever figured out who killed the fishermen, or even noticed that they had disappeared at all. But when Trump and Kim met again in February of 2019, the talks ended with NO DEAL, and Kim soon resumed antagonizing our allies in the Pacific with more missile tests. And now they seem like the missile tests of a lonely and heartbroken man.

But Kim did not crumble. And this weekend was historic for North Korea, with Kim riding down to China in his armored personal luxury train car to hang out in Beijing with Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi. The three appeared in public together for the first time EVER, and maybe also gossiped about Trump’s botched operation and the way he smells like old flop sweat and thousand island dressing, allegedly. And, different from its most recent summits, the “denuclearization of the Korea Peninsular,” was not mentioned in the Chinese readout of a meeting with North Korea. Big progress for the country that has always yearned be accepted as the world’s newest nuclear weapons power. In 2016 and 2017 Russia and China voted with the United States when the UN Security Council imposed harsh economic sanctions, but now that subject has apparently been completely dropped.

Meanwhile, Kim and Putin are getting closer than ever. Last year Russia and North Korea signed a mutual defense pact, and Kim has been sending North Korean troops and arms to Russia’s meat-grinder war in Ukraine. Over the weekend Putin and Kim also sat down together, and before their talks were holding hands. After that they even hugged!

But Kim had less affection for his neighbor South Korea. When he and National Assembly Speaker Woo Won-shik briefly encountered each other it was frosty. Woo said, “It’s been seven years since we last met,” and Kim Jong-un flatly replied, “Yes.”

But otherwise, a love-fest! Kim brought along his 15-years-old-ish-maybe daughter and apparent successor, Ju-Ae, for her first international trip. North Korea is so secretive nobody outside of the country knew she existed until Dennis Rodman spilled that he’d held her. That was sure weird!

Ju-Ae has siblings, but the oldest brother is “more focused on his love for Eric Clapton and guitars than leadership.” Kim Jong-un also has a sister, Yo Jong, who was presumed at one point to be next in line. But he doesn’t have a half-brother or an uncle, because he had them killed thinking they were part of a plot from Beijing to replace him. China is North Korea’s only official ally, but Kim apparently has some trust issues.

Ju-Ae is reportedly now being referred to inside NK as “respected Comrade,” a title her father only got after he was chosen as the future leader.

Anyway, Trump says he had no idea about the botched mission, “I don't know anything about it. I'm hearing it now for the first time.” But of course he would have to had signed off. Maybe he forgot.

Oh well, so much for that World Peace Trump was going to make for us. Now we guess we’ll be getting a North Korea with better nukes, something new to take panicked poops about!

And while the US isolates itself, the world goes on without us.

[New York Times archive link / Chosun Daily]

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