This should come as no shock to anyone who has been paying attention for the last couple of years, actually.

I’ll admit this, upfront, when this story quietly seeped out last week, I missed it. Why it didn’t make more of a splash than it did is beyond me.

Perhaps it was buried by all the noise surrounding the child detainment at the border, and that’s understandable, but we shouldn’t forget that there are multiple issues going on with this administration.

So while Trump prepares an executive order to reunite immigrant children with their illegal immigrant parents, we shouldn’t forget that there are still shady dealings with a dangerous rogue nation, ruled by a murderous tyrant.

One of those issues that went down in the “agreement” between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un was that the United States would stop joint military exercises with our allies, South Korea.

It was a concession made where North Korea got exactly what they wanted and the United States got nothing to show for it (unless you count Donald Trump’s photo-op).

There was no good reason to allow for that. What’s more, it was a unilateral decision on Trump’s part, it seems. He made no prior announcement. He did not notify the Pentagon, leaving the Department of Defense to scramble. And most egregiously, he did not notify South Korea, the ones who would be most affected by the decision.

Good question.

So why in the world would Trump do this? His first stated reason was that canceling the military exercises would save us money, which isn’t altogether true, and which is an argument officials from both parties found bizarre. Trump also argued that the exercises were overtly “provocative” – which represented an exceedingly rare instance in which an American president echoed the talking points of North Korea’s communist dictatorship.

Yeah. He’s been doing that a lot, lately. That’s a big change from the whole, “little rocket man” social media shtick. It’s also a big change for our nation.

So why the big change? Who is putting these ideas into Trump’s head? It would have to be somebody he listens to, because he consulted no one else.

Well, again, if you’ve been paying attention…

But to fully appreciate the oddity of the circumstances, it’s worth understanding where Trump apparently got this idea in the first place. The Wall Street Journal reported in January: Around the same time, Mr. Trump had an idea about how to counter the nuclear threat posed by North Korea, which he got after speaking to Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the U.S. stopped joint military exercises with the South Koreans, it could help moderate Kim Jong Un’s behavior…. Mr. Trump dropped the idea, although he has ordered aides to give the exercises a low profile, eliminating press releases and briefings about them. In context, “around the same time” refers to the period last summer after Trump met with Putin at the G-20 summit in Hamburg.

There were reports of phone conversations between Trump and the Russia president since the January summit, actually. Earlier this month, the Russian strongman and former KGB agent said in an Austrian interview that he and President Trump speak by phone “regularly.”

Why would it be necessary to carry on regular conversations with Vladimir Putin, and why does President Trump’s turnabout on North Korea seem to follow Putin’s script?

For someone who likes to scream about the Russia probe “witch hunt,” he sure seems to be caught in a lot of situations where he’s acting as Vladimir Putin’s dancing monkey.

And those situations are not always beneficial for our nation.