https://popular.info/p/a-citizens-guide-to-trumps-2024-strategy

https://www.crfb.org/debtfixer/

‘Cheesy Gesture’ Alert: Bizarre Video Explained

Ok. So of all the weird moments in the summit, perhaps the weirdest was the faux movie trailer about the summit and its potential for creating riches, produced by the White House. Freddy Gray writing in The Spectator, where he is deputy editor, argues that what Trump lacks in taste he makes up with an intuitive understanding of what Asian cultures are grasping at.:

The text reads like some godawful martial-arts movie trailer crossed with a corporate advertisement for an ambitious construction project: ‘Destiny Pictures presents a story of opportunity. A new story. A new beginning. One of Peace. Two men, two leaders, one destiny.’ It reminded me a lot of this epically absurd advertisement for Sylvester Stallone’s ‘Chaos pen’. Perhaps they used the same content providers.

But, in some peculiar way, this cod spiritual gibberish works. It cuts across boundaries.

Trump has talked before of how he sees the Middle East Peace process as a real-estate problem. He sees North Korea in the same terms. ‘They have great beaches!’ he exclaimed in the press conference after his meeting today. ‘You see that whenever they’re exploding canons into the ocean, right? So I said ‘Boy look at that beach. Wouldn’t it make a great condo behind?’ — and I explained it.’ We can all chortle as much as want, and we will. Clearly, however, Kim was not put off or offended by the suggestion. It’s quite likely he relished the thought.

Trump’s tour of Asia last year was his first foreign-policy success. Thanks to his experience in business, he understands the importance of cheesy gestures in Far Eastern culture. He gave Japanese Prime Minister a baseball cap that said: ‘Donald & Shinzo, Make Alliance Even Greater’. He presented China’s premier Xi Jinping with a video, again on an iPad, of his six-year-old granddaughter, Arabella Kushner, wearing a mini geisha dress and reciting songs and poems in Mandarin. The stunt went largely unnoticed on western social media accounts; those who did spot it tended to cringe. Yet on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, little Arabella became a hit — she has been since she first sang for Xi in Florida earlier that year. The latest Arabella clip got millions of Weibo views. Weibo users said it was ‘extremely cute’ and ‘the best gift’ Trump could have given his hosts. Awww.

International relations experts will roll their eyes and say none of this matters in realpolitik: Trump’s salesman diplomacy cannot change the dynamics of great power relations. Maybe not. But after today’s summit with Kim, it seems obvious that the American president’s global business language, his real-estate politik speaks more clearly than anything that has been tried before.

“Trump flew across the world and all he got was Kim Jong-un saying, ‘I'll think about giving up my nukes’? Kim basically Facebook RSVP’d a nuclear deal.”

-Trevor breaks down the #TrumpKimSummit pic.twitter.com/hex8KjXslD

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) June 13, 2018

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/posts/1500577360086325

(Worth reading.)

I highly and enthusiastically recommend reading Why We’re Living in the Age of Fear (Rolling Stone Magazine)