On Sunday, Donald Trump met North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un for a photo-op handshake in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. On his own initiative, Trump crossed the line into North Korea in order to stand with Kim, becoming the first United States president to ever enter the country.
That camera-friendly movement was all Trump was looking for. Trump had highlighted his intention to visit the DMZ the previous day, inviting Kim to join him for a "handshake"; whether his entreaties were a(nother) show of administration goodwill towards the dictator or an attention-seeking move aimed at the American press is, as always, open to interpretation. Trump has been increasingly bitter about the lack of credit given to him for, after belittling the North Korean "Rocket Man" and tweeting threats of "fire and fury" on the Korean peninsula, allegedly making more progress towards peace than any president before him.
It is clear that he has settled on a negotiated settlement with North Korea as the victory that would set him above those past presidents and, at long last, demonstrate his greatness; his escalating flattery of Kim and continued push for top-level meetings in which he, personally, can be seen as the face of negotiations have in the past half-year begun to smell more strongly of desperation.
The problem for Trump is that he engages with every issue as a photo-op, a bit of self-manufactured grandeur to brighten the lives of the common rabble. From tax policies to health care to war, he shows distain for learning any but the barest details of the product he has been summoned to sell. He waltzes through each scene with the nihilistic pep of a talk show host promoting his latest sponsor, or a too-important actor popping out of his trailer to say his three lines and stomping back in again. Everything is Biggest, or Greatest, or the Most Big League. Everything is a sales pitch. Everything, all the time, is a sales pitch.
The problem for the rest of us is that Trump's obsession with the sales pitch fits extraordinarily well with the North Korean leadership's own most pressing needs. The nation's leaders seek legitimacy on the world stage that can be used to justify the hardships they demand of the rest of the nation; Trump has not only granted it, but repeatedly fallen over himself to do it. North Korea seeks pictures in which Kim Jong Un, a murderous figure who governs the entire nation as work camp, is portrayed as the equal of superpowers; Trump all but begs Kim to allow him to personally grant the favor.
In return, Trump has asked for—and gotten—mostly nothing. North Korea has unsubtly slow-walked its way through negotiations, as usual demanding sanctions relief that would still retain its nuclear arsenal as chip to be used, identically, in future rounds. Trump has granted the regime legitimacy and authority already; the photos already exist, and have already been broadcast. Both Trump and Kim have used the negotiations primarily, and in fact exclusively, for domestic self-promotion. But Trump needs the advertising more than Kim does.
For Kim, standing on equal footing with other world leaders as a legitimized nuclear power was the long-sought goal. He can rebuff (and has) further steps with no consequence; if anyone dares criticize the lack of further progress, he can execute each of them at his leisure. It was Trump who promised something more, and it is Trump who is getting more squirrelly at the thought of failure. It is Trump who asked Kim for permission to step into North Korea, marking a new "first" to be crowed about in the papers back home. It was not Kim who initiated it.
If anyone doubted the propaganda uses for Trump's moves back home, the Trump cheerleading corps scurried to utilize them. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, already the network's top promoter of the white nationalist far-right, dismissed "silly and stupid" criticisms of Kim by pronouncing that "You've got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people." On the Fox News website, editorialists declared that Trump deserved a Nobel Prize for the meetup, since President Obama got one for "nearly nothing."
"Most people can’t recite the details of a certain treaty or document that made history, but they always remember the photo that did," says the author in glorious praise. The step across the border, says he, is "a day I never thought I would see in my lifetime."
At some point it is going to fall on some future administration to sort the tangles of this out, both here and in diplomacy across the globe. Trump's embrace of authoritarianism has, at the least, served to legitimize it as a valid form of government. His dismissals of corruption, of oppression, and (notably) of the outright murder of journalists and other foes have sent a clear signal that the world's superpower has grown weary of making human rights demands; it will be harder to remake them in the future.
In the Fox News sphere of boosterism, these new Trump advances toward the world's autocrats are costless, a worthy rejection of archaic diplomat-led tact in favor of something new and bold. The costs, though, have not yet been tallied.