The big fear of liberals isn't that President Donald Trump will fail. What really gnaws at them is their extreme fear that Trump will be successful. In the case of Vox's senior correspondent, Matthew Yglesias, the specific possibility that Trump's policy towards North Korea could prove to be a success has inspired a Trump deranged horror in him.
You can see the symptoms of his derangement in the very first two paragraphs of his May 14 mental meltdown known as Why are we taking Donald Trump’s Korea diplomacy seriously?
Donald Trump is a liar. More than that, he’s a fraud. Not just a person who makes factual misstatements but a person who has gotten ahead in life through extensive use of bullshit, leaving in his wake a trail of broken promises.
From his unpaid bills to contractors to his scam university to his brief period ripping off the shareholders of his eponymous company, this is what Trump does — he exploits normal human nature to sucker people into trusting him, and then he exploits his own ever-growing fame and power to get away with breaking the rules.
And now his mental meltdown flows into the area of policy towards North Korea:
A good clue that we are being set up for some bullshit is that not only is the Trump administration’s North Korea policy being headed up by Donald Trump, but it has been conducted so far like you would expect a bullshitter to conduct policy.
The key turnabout in the region, after all, has come from the fact that Trump decided to make a large, unilateral concession to the North Koreans. As Josh Smith and David Brunnstrom reported for Reuters in March, “for at least two decades, leaders in North Korea have been seeking a personal meeting with an American president,” and across all that time American presidents have been saying no.
And yet we got the three American prisoners back with no concessions.
Back in the real world, meanwhile, Trump isn’t a master strategist keeping the North Koreans off balance. He’s an erratic guy with poor impulse control and little understanding of issues who does things like blurt out that Americans held captive in North Korea and sentenced to serve in labor camps received “excellent” treatment from the regime that used them as hostages.
Maybe he should have denounced their treatment to enrage North Korea so we go back to square one with North Korea again threatening to launch its nukes?
And there are at least three big ways this could end up going badly:
Which liberals desperately hope will happen. The possibility of nuclear war is less frightening for them than having to live in a tragic reality in which Trump is successful in bringing peace to the Korean peninsula.
Trump could make a big show of a decisive diplomatic breakthrough at some strategically opportune moment in the fall to try to gain the upper hand in the midterm elections, only for the actual details to prove meaningless when there’s time for analysis later.
Trump could sell out American interests by agreeing to an unfavorable deal, simply for the sake of the positive PR of a major breakthrough — with Republicans in Congress backing him up out of partisanship and nobody able to do anything about it for years.
Trump could show up in Singapore, discover that Kim is not in fact interested in the kind of thorough disarmament that Trump has in mind, and then, feeling miffed by the North Koreans, embrace National Security Adviser John Bolton’s preference for an unprovoked American military strike.
Or...Trump could show up in Singapore and discover that Kim is wearing a "Make Korea Great Again Cap."
I’m happy to admit that it is, at least in theory, possible that a vainglorious, dishonest, ignorant, and corrupt president who is already lying about his own diplomatic initiatives will shock the world by delivering something fantastic. But Trump has been in the public eye for decades, has a well-deserved reputation as a braggart and a liar, and deserves to be met with nothing but skepticism.
Translation: A Trump success in Korea and elsewhere will cause severe liberal depression to such a great extent as to result in either permanent occupancy of the Rubber Room or a trip to the Heaven's Gate Mother Ship.
