On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kim Jong Un, the North Korean dictator once described by Donald Trump as “short and fat,” had a suspected traitor in his midst: Kim Jong Nam, Un’s half brother. Nam was considered by U.S. intelligence to have little insight into the inner workings of the Kim regime, according to former U.S. officials, but nonetheless was suspected by the Malaysian government to be a CIA source. In February 2017 he was killed in Kuala Lumpur when two women smeared a nerve agent on his face, causing his sudden death within an hour. Both later claimed that they had been recruited into participating in what they believed was a hidden-camera prank show.

Did Trump care, reporters asked the next day on the South Lawn? “I saw the information about the CIA,” he acknowledged, and “I would tell [Un] that that would not happen under my auspices.” In essence, Trump told a dictator that the agency would stop spying on him.

It seems like only yesterday (2017) that Trump stood in front of the U.N. General Assembly and threatened to “totally destroy North Korea,” claiming that Kim, a.k.a. “Rocket Man”, was “on a suicide mission for himself.” Less than two years later, Trump is singing a totally different tune. “I did receive a beautiful letter from Kim Jong Un...I appreciated the letter,” he noted after his extraordinary promise to stop spying on North Korea. “North Korea has tremendous potential” under the brutal dictator, Trump continued, bragging that he was single-handedly responsible for what he perceives as an about-face. “No major missile testing, nothing like when I first got here,” he said. “When I first got here, it was a bad mess. We have a very good relationship together.”

Not good enough, apparently, to paper over Trump’s recent failure in Hanoi, where he entered negotiations with the North Koreans over ending Kim’s nuclear weapons program. Though both sides had hyped up the potential deal, the talks collapsed within days with nothing resolved. But Kim, who once called Trump a “dotard,” may be attempting to woo him back with “beautiful” letters, and the authoritarian-curious Trump seems willing to toss out one of America’s great defensive assets in order to let him.

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