Trump is unnecessarily putting American lives at risk in an effort to quench his insatiable need for media attention.
Trump has consistently lowered the bar when it comes to being despicable.
He claims to cherish women; however, as Huffington Post reported, over the years Trump “has consistently insulted, belittled, sexualized and stereotyped women. He has also taken the time to personally insult individual notable women like Sarah Jessica Parker, Rosie O’Donnell, Cher, Bette Midler, and others.”
He managed to find a new low last September when he lashed out at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz after she tearfully begged for help from him and the rest of the world in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, Trump manages to find a new rock to slither under to disgrace himself and his administration.
As The Washington Post reported on Friday, Trump and his advisers are treating the fate of the North Korea prisoners as a cliffhanger.
“As he has sought to build anticipation for his high-stakes summit with Kim Jong Un,” Trump has done his best to create media hype, delighting “in dropping tantalizing hints about where the meeting will take place… and what can be achieved – perhaps a peace treaty.”
Continuing, The Washington Post reported that:
This week, the president, without direct prompting, casually raised another possibility, noting on Twitter that three Americans prisoners have been held in a North Korean labor camp. But, he suggested in a tweet, that could soon change: “Stay tuned!”
Stay tuned. Who knows? We’ll see what happens. The president often uses such phrases to hype dramatic possibilities, even if some of them might not pan out or might fall short of his grand pronouncements.
The Washington Post went on to explain that Trump’s callous need for media attention is needlessly putting the lives of those prisoners at risk.
[I]n the case of the prisoners, Trump and some key surrogates have again shattered long-standing Washington protocols by speaking so openly about delicate negotiations on American detainees, potentially risking a last-minute setback or coming across as insensitive to the privacy of their families, according to former U.S. diplomatic and intelligence officials.
“I think it is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever spent five minutes negotiating with the North Koreans that you do not announce things that have not happened,” said Christopher Hill, a former State Department official who led the U.S. delegation in the six-party talks with Pyongyang during the George W. Bush administration.
“I understand they take pride in doing things differently,” Hill said of Trump’s team. “But this is serious business — people’s lives are at stake. It just takes a little bit of discipline.”
[…]
Joseph Yun, who as the State Department’s former point man on North Korea brought [another prisoner, American college student Otto] Warmbier home to Ohio, said Thursday on CNN that administration officials talking about the three Americans publicly could jeopardize efforts to free them.
According to The Washington Post, there is another problem with Trump’s handling of the prisoners – all his media hype could in turn give Kim Jong Un leverage to use against him when the two men meet in a few weeks.
Foreign policy experts said it is likely the North will release them as a goodwill gesture. However… speaking publicly about their fate could make the hostages a more important leverage point for Kim.
“The more public you make it and the more you say something is going to happen that has not happened, it creates leverage for no reason,” said Jung Pak, a former CIA official who now works as an Asia analyst for the Brookings Institution. “It’s not going to get us anything, and it draws criticism that you are politicizing the detainees.”
The Washington Post concluded their analysis of the situation, quoting Jung Pak.
“When we talk about North Korea, in general, we tend to forget we’re talking about people, and these abductees have families who have been anxiously awaiting their return and are only relying on governments to do that,” said Pak, the former intelligence official. “It would be best to be circumspect in discussions like this. We’re talking about real lives.”
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