Trump says this -- earnestly! -- about Kim Jong Un: "We went back and forth, then we fell in love. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they are great letters. We fell in love." pic.twitter.com/05KpsRgkZJ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 30, 2018

After a week of domestic political trauma in the Senate, President Trump got back to being terrible at his job. On Saturday night, Trump hit the campaign trail for a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia in support of Republican Senate nominee Patrick Morrissey, who is perhaps the GOP’s best hope in November to win back a handful of vulnerable Democrat-held seats. Amidst the usual inflammatory, defamatory rhetoric about Democrats, Trump pivoted to his relationship with dictatorial North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.

… I was really being tough. And so was he. And we were going back-and-forth. And then we fell in love, OK? No really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love. But you know what, now they’ll say: ‘Donald Trump said they fell in love. How horrible! How horrible is that? So unpresidential.’ I always tell you it’s so easy to be presidential, but instead of having 10,000 people outside trying to get into this packed arena, we’d have about 200 people standing right there.

It’s an astonishing remark, even in quasi-jest. Or whatever that was. It’s also a very weird characterization (of a nuclear adversary, no less) from a man who, among everything else, is exceedingly weird.