It’s a safe bet who North Korea’s Kim Jong-un will be “rooting” for in the U.S. elections on Nov. 5.
Alone among the “bad guys” Kamala Harris might have chosen to skewer at the Democratic convention, she singled out Kim. “I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong-un, who are rooting for Trump,” she said. “They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.”
That was Harris’s way of heaping scorn on the dictator with whom her opponent, Donald Trump, professed to have “fallen in love” at their 2018 summit in Singapore (notwithstanding the failure of their next summit eight months later in Hanoi).
Trump at the GOP convention in Milwaukee last month said he “got along very well” with Kim. Having confirmed their “bromance” in an exchange of letters before and since Hanoi, Trump could say, “It is nice to get along with someone that has a lot of nuclear weapons or otherwise.” For sure, he added, “He'd like to see me back too — I think he misses me...when we get back, I get along with him.”
The ferocity of the vice president’s attack on Kim contrasted with her allusion to the only other national leader she deemed worthy of mention in her speech beside Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, whose name came up just twice. Trump, she said, “encouraged Putin to invade our allies” while she had “helped mobilize a global response” to Putin’s aggression.
What about China’s President Xi Jinping? His name........