Boy, the wheels are really coming off now.
Donald Trump, seemingly not satisfied with the solid 6-ish he registered on the 1-10 crazy scale this week, took the extraordinary step on Friday of rolling back Treasury sanctions on North Korea just a day after they were imposed.
On Thursday, the US targeted a pair of China-based shipping companies accused of assisting North Korea in an ongoing effort to evade sanctions. Treasury also updated the shipping advisory, adding multiple vessels thought to have exported North Korean coal or participated in ship-to-ship transfers.
Those were the first North Korea-related sanctions Treasury has imposed since late last year.
For Trump to have summarily declared them null and void just hours after they were announced would be bizarre enough on its own, but the real kicker is that he announced it on Twitter in what I (and I’d wager many others) thought might have been a typo.
“It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea”, Trump tweeted.
So far, so good.
And then we got this:
I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!
Wait, what? Did the President of the United States just essentially tell Treasury and State that their opinion is no longer relevant when it comes to the “maximum pressure” campaign on Pyongyang?
And was this a Rex Tillerson-type deal where the first anyone heard about the decision was on Twitter? More to the point, did Trump’s social media followers find this out before Mnuchin?
Maybe!
And doesn’t this appear to be extremely ill-advised considering myriad reports which suggest Kim is being pulled back to the dark side, including satellite photos that allegedly show the North rebuilding a missile launch site it previously said was dismantled as a show of good faith?
Finally, does this suggest that Trump is desperate to stay in Kim’s good graces after the failed summit in Hanoi last month lest he (Trump) should have to explain why missiles are flying over Japan again despite his pretensions to being a world-class peacemaker?
Who knows. All we know is the following, which is an actual statement from Sarah Huckabee Sanders:
President Trump likes Chairman Kim, and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary.
Nothing further.
Read more
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MAGA.
The ultimate fascination …..those that rationalize his irrational decisions…..
The emperor has spoken. How dare his minions take it upon themselves to rebuke his close friend and fellow sole ruler.
Our ‘stable genius’ is ‘in love’ with Mr. Kim, so in POTUS’s narcissistic mind, he doesn’t want any impediments to their ‘relationship’ despite U.S. intelligence that Kim is re-activating his ICBM Missile launching site(s) and who knows what he is doing to maintain/increase his nuclear weapons program.
dealmaker extraordinaire.
must have been the Mueller headline popping some blood vessels in his very large ah-brain
Have to keep that Hanoi Trump Tower deal alive!