THE SCORE FOR “SINGAPORE SUMMIT”: NORTH KOREA: 100, US: 00

…North Korean Beaches.  Will there be a Trump Hotel or Trump Golf Course here?

The propaganda video at the Summit reeked of typical Trump excesses.

It was appalling how the president had played the press and the attendees at the so called “Singapore Summit”.

As the reporters crowded into a Singapore auditorium, they were expecting President Trump to walk out and announce the results of his historic meeting with the North Korean leader.  But instead, they were surprised when two huge screens on either side of the empty podium came to life.

Glorious music boomed over the speakers, and the reporters and attendees were bombarded with a slickly produced video portraying a possible future North Korea as some sort of paradise.

It was unbelievable for them to sit there and watch golden sunrises, gleaming skylines and high-speed trains, along with children skipping through Kim Il Sung square in Pyongyang. North Korean flags were fluttering between images of the Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal and even the Lincoln Memorial.

In a split-screen shot, Kim Jong Un waved to an adoring crowd while President Trump stood beside him with his thumbs up.  The pair appeared over and over again, like they were running mates in a campaign election video.

This was not a 60 or 90 second commercial.  This went on in the obviously expensive production for five full minutes. It included brief interludes of missiles, soldiers and warships interrupting all the pageantry.  Some of the journalists, that could not understand the Korean-language narration, they initially assumed they were watching one of Pyongyang's infamous propaganda films.  In fact, one reporter asked, “What country are we in?”.

However, the video then looped, and started playing in English.  Trump then walked onto the stage and confirmed what everyone had realized.  That the film was not North Korean propaganda.......it was Trump propaganda. 

It had obviously been "Made in America", on the orders of Trump's White House, for the benefit of the North Korean leader.  “I hope you liked it,” Trump told the reporters. “I thought it was good. I thought it was interesting enough to show. ... And I think he [Kim] loved it.”  (Of course Trump loved it.  He was one of the stars!)

The reporters grumbled and they were all very skeptical.  But most did realize that Trump had just provided the greatest US sanctioned propaganda that any free country could have provided to an outrageous and cruel dictator.  And one that happened to be one of our longest and most horrible adversaries.

As expected, President Trump tried to explain that the video was more like an elevator speech.  (But I thought elevator speeches were supposed to be less than 60 seconds, not 5 minutes....?)

It was exactly the type of glitzy production that Trump would have used to persuade a building investor to finance his hotels.  He obviously now hoped it would persuade one of the most repressive regimes in the world to disarm its nuclear weapons and end nearly 70 years of international isolation and militant attitude to the United States.

One must remember that two US presidents have been duped by this same North Korean regime.  In fact, some of the same individuals in North Korea that had help dupe both Clinton and Bush, they are still working in Kim’s regime.  Why should they change their stripes when they now have what they have been working on for decades.  They now have "real nuclear devices" and the missiles that could reach the US mainland, not to mention South Korea and Japan.

But as to the five minute video presentation, it even had its Hollywood-style logo saying it was: “A Destiny Pictures Production”.  However, the film company of that same name located in Los Angeles, they have denied any involvement in the making of the video.  Of course, the Trump White House has yet to responded to any questions about who made it.

Oh, and not to be left out, the video had the multi-body-pierced, Dennis Rodman reminding us about his former efforts to broker peace with North Korea some years ago.

The message of the video was very clear: Kim had a decision to make. To make its point, the film went from old, grim black-and-white shots of the United States' 1950s-era war with North Korea, into a montage of beautiful rose-colored parades and gold-tinted clouds.

                                                                                                                            

“The past doesn't have to be the future,” a narrator said. “What if a people that share a common and rich heritage can find a common future?”

The video took some of its ideas from the kind of videos that were produced to keep the North Korean people in line.

The techniques became very dramatic a minute later into the film. The beautiful footage melted into a horror montage of war planes and missiles bearing down on North Korean cities.  The video became much like the propaganda videos that Pyongyang had produced just a few months ago, when Kim and Trump had sounded as if they were on the brink of nuclear war.

But in Trump's video, the destruction started to rewind itself. The video reversed and the missiles flew backwards onto to their launching pads, and a science fiction-like version of North Korea took its place. It was one of working crane-dotted skylines, of local crowded highways, of computerized factories and drones delivering packages.  All of this was presided over by a waving, grinning Kim and President Trump.

The footage was more and more resembling a Hollywood movie trailer as it built to its final scenes.  It featured, “President Donald Trump and Chairman Kim Jong Un in a meeting to remake history,” the narrator concluded, as Korean words flashed on a black background: “It is going to become a reality.”

After the video, the Time magazine reporter asked the president, “Do you now see Kim Jong Un as an equal?”

“In what way?” Trump asked.

“Well, you just showed a video that showed you and Kim Jong Un on equal footing, and discussing the future of the country.”

Either the president misunderstood the question, or he side-stepped it, as he referred in his answer to his closed-door talks with Kim, not to the US made video that presented the totalitarian autocrat as a hero.

“If I have to say I'm sitting on a stage with Chairman Kim and that gets us to save 30 million lives, it could be more than that, I'm willing to sit on a stage, I'm willing to travel to Singapore, very proudly,” Trump said.

“Are you concerned the video you just showed could be used by Kim as propaganda, to show him as ...”  Trump cut the question off. “No, I'm not concerned at all. We can use that video for other countries.”  Sounding exactly  like he was talking to his hotel investors.

Trump had apparently played the video for Kim during the brief, private meeting hours earlier.  “We didn’t have a big screen like you have the luxury of having,” Trump said. “We didn't need it, because we had it on cassette, uh, on an iPad.  I thought it was well done. I showed it to you because that's the future. I mean, that could very well be the future. And the other alternative is just not a very good alternative. It's just not good.”

Well, the international press had very different point-of-views.

"Schlocky" said the representative from Vanity Fair.  "Odd,” said the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.  "One observer dismissed it as 'a word salad topped with gratuitous appeasement of a monstrous regime,” said the South China Morning Post.

The Daily Mail noted that as the narrator described North Korea's glorious future of  technology and international investment, the video showed stock footage of the Miami Beach shoreline, not far from a Trump-owned hotel. The Spectator called the whole sequence "real-estate politik". 

The president did acknowledged that some of the film's imagery may seem far-fetched.  The reality is that today, North Korea is mired in poverty.  It is internationally isolated, and it has been mismanaged for decades by the Kim family of dictators.  That includes Kim, his father and his grandfather.

As usual, for the real estate mogul, what did he do but go into his sales pitch and he began thinking out loud about the “great condos” that might one day be built on the “great beaches” of North Korea.  (You know, the ones you see in the video of the North Korean missiles heading out over the ocean.)  “I explained it [to Kim],” Trump said. “You could have the best hotels in the world. Think of it from the real estate perspective.”  Typical Trump.

This is how bizarre this presidential administration has become.

The reality is that Trump has now said that the defensive war exercises between the US, South Korea and Japan are going to stop, even though the Pentagon and many in the US Congress don’t agree.  Trump has said that he is going to visit Pyongyang, and he is going to invite Kim to the White House, all of this is for North Korea, while Kim isn’t giving up anything.

So there are no commitments or schedules for de-nuking North Korea, while Trump has made Kim Jon Un, regardless of how cruel he is, he is now a legitimate national leader.

Prior to meeting the President of the United States, the young dictator had never left his country, and he had never met any world leaders.  He has since met the leaders of China, South Korea and the United States.  He has been invited to the White House and Vladimir Putin has expressed interest in inviting him to Moscow.

These are things that his father and his grandfather greatly desired, but neither had ever left their capital, Pyongyang.

So. the final score for the "Singapore Summit":  Kim Jong Un: 100, Donald Trump: ZIP.

Copyright G.Ater  2018